Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a key technology for next-generation wireless networking. In a WMN, wireless routers provide multi-hop wireless connectivity between hosts in the network and also allow hosts to access the Internet via the gateway nodes. Wireless routers are typically equipped with multiple radios operating on different channels to increase network throughput. Multicast is a form of communication that delivers data from a source to a set of destinations simultaneously. It is used in a number of applications such as distributed games, distance education, and video conferencing. In this work, we address the channel assignment problem for multicast in multi-radio multi-channel WMNs. In a multi-radio multi-channel WMN, when two nearby nodes transmit on the same channel, they will interfere with each other and cause throughput decrease. Thus, an important goal for multicast channel assignment is to reduce the interference among the tree nodes. We have developed a Minimum Interference Channel Assignment (MICA) algorithm for multicast that accurately models the interference relationship between pairs of multicast tree nodes using the concept of interference factor and assigns channels to tree nodes to minimize interference within the multicast tree. Simulation results show that MICA achieves higher throughout and lower end-to-end packet delay compared with an existing channel assignment algorithm named MCM. In addition, MICA achieves much lower throughput variation among the destination nodes than MCM.
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