Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) are gaining significant momentum as a promising technology for the next-coming state-of-the-art wireless networking. Among many factors, the performance of WMNs would be largely affected by the properness of the deployed routing protocols and the efficient usage of wireless resources. Routing protocols are required to well capture WMNs' features while wireless channels should be used efficiently in order to accommodate high amount of traffics over the mesh backbone. Recently, a Tree-based Routing (TBR) protocol become a popular state-of-the-art proactive routing protocol and its tree-based broadcasting become an often used technique. Though TBR protocol is well-suited for WMNs' architecture and the skewed nature of traffic toward the root, the protocol in its current form faces issues which has to be addressed. Specifically, when some or all nodes are equipped with multiple radios, to reduce collision and co-channel interference, not only the parent-child relationship but also the sibling relationship need to be constructed by the TBR protocol in the multi-channel WMNs. In this paper, we propose a hybrid tree-based protocol for concurrent routing and channel assignment over WMNs. The protocol makes use of sibling links to mitigate the aforementioned shortcomings of TBR protocol. Moreover, in order to address high backbone traffic, the protocol integrates a receiver-based channel assignment scheme. The protocol efficiently deploys the parent-child topo-logical relationships of nodes to enhance efficiency of broadcast transmissions over receiver-based multi-channel WMNs. Simulation results over NS-2 network simulator reveal that our proposed hybrid tree-based protocol achieves much higher performance than the utilization of the original receiver-based CA and TBR protocol.
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