Distributed Joint Channel and Routing Assignment for Multimedia Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been increasingly used to carry multimedia traffic with flow requirements. The performance of multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) WMNs largely depends on the routing and channel assignment. Because routing and channel decisions are coupled, they need to be jointly optimized to achieve the best performance. This is the so-called routing and channel assignment (RCA) problem, which is known to be NP-hard. There has not been sufficient consideration on joint RCA optimization which takes into account multimedia traffic demands in the network. In this paper, we propose and study CRAFT (Channel and Routing Assignment with Flow Traffic) for MRMC WMNs. CRAFT is distributed, cooperative, computationally efficient and simple to implement. It jointly optimizes routing and channel assignment by using a properly designed objective function to meet the flow demands of the mesh nodes. Simulation results based on NS3 show that CRAFT performs much better than other state-of-the-art schemes in terms of convergence, delay, loss rate and throughput.