Joint Channel and Rate Selection for Multicast Routing Trees in Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper addresses the problem of joint channel and rate selection for multicast routing trees in multi-radio multi-rate multi-channel wireless mesh networks. In this regard, we present an efficient link-layer algorithm named Interference Aware Joint Channel and Rate Selection (IA-JCRS) to choose the best transmission rates and the best transmission channels for a given multicast routing tree. The proposed scheme considers both the inter-flow and the intra-flow interferences. It not only minimizes the number of transmissions, but also balances the traffic load over all available channels in the network. With the aim of selecting the most efficient channels, the IA-JCRS scheme engages the interfering neighbors to vote to the candidate feasible channels. Numerical results confirm the efficiency of the proposed algorithm in various networks with grid and random topologies.