Fairness-oriented semichaotic genetic algorithm-based channel assignment technique for node starvation problem in wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a scalable, reliable, and agile wireless network that supports many types of innovative technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), and Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Due to the limited number of orthogonal channels, interference between channels adversely affects the fair distribution of bandwidth among mesh clients, causing node starvation in terms of insufficient bandwidth distribution, which impedes the adoption of WMN as an efficient access technology. Therefore, a fair channel assignment is crucial for the mesh clients to utilize the available resources. However, the node starvation problem due to unfair channel distribution has been vastly overlooked during channel assignment by the extant research. Instead, existing channel assignment algorithms equally distribute the interference reduction on the links to achieve fairness which neither guarantees a fair distribution of the network bandwidth nor eliminates node starvation. In addition, the metaheuristic-based solutions such as genetic algorithm, which is commonly used for WMN, use randomness in creating initial population and selecting the new generation usually leading the search to local minima. To this end, this study proposes a Fairness-Oriented Semichaotic Genetic Algorithm-Based Channel Assignment Technique (FA-SCGA-CAA) to solve node starvation problem in wireless mesh networks. FA-SCGA-CAA maximizes link fairness while minimizing link interference using a genetic algorithm (GA) with a novel nonlinear fairness-oriented fitness function. The primary chromosome with powerful genes is created based on multicriterion links ranking channel assignment algorithm. Such a chromosome was used with a proposed semichaotic technique to create a strong population that directs the search towards the global minima effectively and efficiently. The proposed semichaotic technique was also used during the mutation and parent selection of the new genes. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed algorithm. A comparison with related work shows that the proposed FA-SCGA-CAA reduced the potential node starvation by 22% and improved network capacity utilization by 23%. It can be concluded that the proposed FA-SCGA-CAA is reliable to maintain high node-level fairness while maximizing the utilization of the network resources, which is the ultimate goal of many wireless networks.