Joint Channel Assignment and Multicast Routing in Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks Based on Q-Learning
Amin Erfanian Araqi, Behrad Mahboobi · 2019
Recently, importance of wireless networks increased significantly. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are receiving growing attention and offer many advantages in terms of connectivity and reliability. Multicast communication is an important technology for wireless networks in which the same content of data should be delivered to a group of receiver nodes simultaneously. So multicast routing provides efficient data distribution among a group of nodes rather than other traditional unicast routing strategies. Here we focus on the Channel Allocation (CA) scheme which efficiently utilizes multiple wireless interfaces to achieve better throughput and improving the radio interference. This kind of problem has been proved to be NP-hard. Hence, solving the multicast channel assignment problem in MCMR WMNs will be more complicated than that of traditional networks. The research in this paper is aimed at improving the network performance for efficient joint channel assignment and multicast routing problem in MCMR WMNs by using the Q-learning scheme. We also implement our proposed channel assignment algorithm, and evaluate and compare its performance with LAMR. Simulations and experimental results demonstrate that QLMR outperforms the previous works in terms of achieved average throughput, average end-to-end delay, average packet delivery ratio and so on. We will evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme.