Fairness-oriented routing algorithm joint with power control and channel assignment for multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

The multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh network (MRMC-WMN) draws general attention because of its excellent throughput performance, robustness and relative low cost. The closed interactions among power control (PC), channel assignment (CA) and routing is contributed to the performance of multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks (MRMC-WMNs). However, the joint PC, CA and routing (JPCR) design, desired to achieve a global optimization, was poor addressed. The authors present a routing algorithm joint with PC and CA (JPCRA) to seek the routing, power and channel scheme for each flow, which can improve the fairness performance. Firstly, considering available channels and power levels, the routing metric, called minimum flow rate, is designed based on the physical interference and Shannon channel models. The JPCRA is presented based on the genetic algorithm (GA) with simulated annealing to maximize the minimum flow rate, an non-deterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-Hard) problem. Simulations show the JPCRA obtains better fairness among different flows and higher network throughput.