Partially overlapped channels (POCs)-based design has been identified recently as an emerging technology to further eliminate interference and improve network capacity. However, there are only few studies of channel assignment algorithms for POCs. In this paper, we research on utilizing POCs to improve network capacity and propose a traffic-irrelevant channel assignment algorithm, which assigns channels for all links in the network while minimizing total network interference. Theoretical calculation approach is utilized to obtain the direct relationship between interference ranges and channel separations, which can be easily applied to mesh networks with various configurations without modification. As traffic between the Internet and clients is considered to be dominant, distance from the gateway, number of neighbors, and interference are used to determine the channel assignment order of links. Simulation results reveal that network throughput and end-to-end delay performance can be dramatically improved by fully exploiting POCs as well as orthogonal channels.

Channel assignment assigns proper channels for interfaces, which helps dramatically reduce interference and improve network capacity. Routing selects proper paths for packet delivery, which can also help improve network capacity. In order to reduce computational complexity of joint multicast routing and channel assignment, multicast routing and channel assignment are regarded as two separate problems and solved sequentially in this paper. A scheme named Sequential BIP is proposed to obtain optimal solutions to multicast routing and channel assignment. Simulation results demonstrate its effectiveness and show that it can be used as benchmark to evaluate other schemes.