Channel assignment strategy in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks based on improved binary integer programming

Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Network (MCMR WMN) has become an emerging wireless access technology aimed at provisioning high quality services for end users. Multicast can provide network services to a group of specific target receivers simultaneously, so it has become the key technology for wireless mesh network. It mainly contains two issues that multicast tree construction and channel assignment in MCMR WMN. Some prior papers do research for the two issues separately, but some irrationality will occur if researched separately, based on which, some relevant authors put forward an idea that joint multicast tree construction and channel assignment, what's more, a binary integer programming model (BIP) is built. It is BIP's idea that either the allocation of a specified channel or not assigned for some specified radio as well as combined with the associated constraints, but the model does not consider the condition that target nodes may forward packets. Additionally, the network performance can be greater if utilizing the partially overlapping channel. In this paper, a binary integer programming model based improved algorithm (IBIP) is put forward as well as solved the hidden channel problem existing in MCMR WMN after considering all these conditions based on prior foundation. Finally, the validity of IBIP proposed by this paper has been verified through simulation experiments. Simultaneously, IBIP has been proved to be better than BIP by the contrast experiments.