Joint QoS multicast routing and channel assignment in multiradio multichannel wireless mesh networks using intelligent computational methods

In this paper, the quality of service multicast routing and channel assignment (QoS-MRCA) problem is investigated. It is proved to be a NP-hard problem. Previous work separates the multicast tree construction from the channel assignment. Therefore they bear severe drawback, that is, channel assignment cannot work well with the determined multicast tree. In this paper, we integrate them together and solve it by intelligent computational methods. First, we develop a unified framework which consists of the problem formulation, the solution representation, the fitness function, and the channel assignment algorithm. Then, we propose three separate algorithms based on three representative intelligent computational methods (i.e., genetic algorithm, simulated annealing, and tabu search). These three algorithms aim to search minimum-interference multicast trees which also satisfy the end-to-end delay constraint and optimize the usage of the scarce radio network resource in wireless mesh networks. To achieve this goal, the optimization techniques based on state of the art genetic algorithm and the techniques to control the annealing process and the tabu search procedure are well developed separately. Simulation results show that the proposed three intelligent computational methods based multicast algorithms all achieve better performance in terms of both the total channel conflict and the tree cost than those comparative references.