i-QCA: An intelligent framework for quality of service multicast routing in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks

Multicast routing has brought a revolution by enabling the delivery of the same content to a group of receivers simultaneously. However, multicast routing in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks has been proved to be an NP-hard problem. To achieve optimal performance in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks the channel assignment strategy plays an important role. In this paper, we present an intelligent Quality of service multicast routing and Channel Assignment (i-QCA) algorithm which solves the multicast tree construction and channel assignment problem conjointly by intelligent computational methods. The multicast tree construction algorithm is based on the differential evolution approach. The channel assignments in prior works are mostly oriented toward heuristic or meta heuristic approaches and hence produce suboptimal results. The proposed algorithm consists of a genetic algorithm based channel assignment strategy and determines a delay, jitter bounded minimal interference lowcost multicast tree. Our experimental results clearly show that the proposed algorithm achieves much better performance as compared to Multi Channel Multicast (MCM) and QoS Multicast Routing and Channel Assignment (QoS-MRCA) algorithm in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh network environments.