An immune algorithm for minimum interference channel assignment in multi-radio wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks typically employ mesh routers that are equipped with multiple radio interfaces to improve network capacity. The key is to cleverly assign different channels (i.e. frequency bands) to each radio interface to form a mesh network with minimum interference. The channel assignment must obey the constraints that the number of different channels assigned to a router is at most the number of interfaces on the router, and the resultant mesh network is connected. This problem is known to be NP-hard. We propose an immune algorithm which performs greedy channel assignment to obtain feasible solutions, and use the clonal selection principle to improve the solutions. Through extensive simulations, we show that our algorithm out-perform a genetic algorithm and a graph-theoretic algorithm proposed for the same problem.