Congestion aware channel allocation with route scheduling in wireless cognitive radio mesh network

•We present a mathematical formulation for the joint channel assignment and routing scheduling problem.•We propose a nested optimization strategy to solve the complicated problem.•We propose a channel allocation algorithm based on genetic algorithm.•We propose a GA-based routing scheduling algorithm combined with optimal path selection to maximize congestion avoidance.•We design two encoding rules to ensure individual validity and fast convergence.

In this paper, we investigate the issue of congestion avoiding in wireless cognitive radio mesh networks, which involves two main challenges, how to assign channels to minimize interference and how to schedule routes to maximize network throughput. By constructing bandwidth-guaranteed topology graph, we present a mathematical formulation to account for the complex relationships among the effect of network interference, link capacity and flow conservation. Further, a nested optimization strategy is proposed to solve the complicated problem, including a genetic approach for channel allocation, a genetic approach for route scheduling and an optimal path selection algorithm to find maximum bandwidth path. In order to ensure the individual validity and fast convergence, both the combination and sequence-based encoding rules are designed with appropriate constraint control mechanisms. Extensive simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm.

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