Backtracking and best-first based channel assignment strategy for multicast in multi-radio wireless mesh networks

In multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks (WMNs), we are interested in how to allocate interference-free and partially overlapping channels to a multicast tree to support multiple high-quality video/audio stream transmissions. The goal is to maximize the number of serviced clients so that the maximum profits can be obtained. A new channel assignment approach named BBF algorithm based on backtracking and best-first search strategies are developed. The experimental results show that our BBF method outperforms the conventional methods based on BFS and DFS principles in terms of the number of serviced clients, throughput and packet loss rate.