Minimum Interference Channel Assignment for Multicast in Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-radio, multi-channel wireless mesh networking is an emerging wireless technology which enables the use of multiple radios in each wireless mesh router. Each radio is assigned to a particular channel based on a channel assignment algorithm in order to solve some objective function, e.g., maximizing network throughput or minimizing wireless interference. Multicast is a form of communication that delivers information from a source to a set of destinations simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a channel assignment (CA) algorithm for multicast using both orthogonal and partially overlapping channels. The algorithm enables the nodes in a multicast tree to operate with minimum interference. We evaluate the performance of the proposed CA using various multicast group sizes and numbers of available channels, and compare it with that of the multi-channel multicast (MCM) algorithm proposed by Zeng et al. (2007).