JRCA: A joint routing and channel assignment scheme for wireless mesh networks

In this paper we consider the joint channel assignment and routing problem in multi-radio multi-gateway wireless mesh networks for improving the quality of communications in the network. This channel assignment problem is proven to be an NP-complete problem. We present a novel backtracking and genetic algorithm based channel assignment and quality aware route selection scheme to maximize the overall performance of communications while reducing the computational complexity. We perform extensive simulation studies that show that our proposed channel assignment and route selection scheme performs significantly better than single channel and random channel selection based schemes.