Patent ID: 7471633

Claim:
A wireless mesh network router comprising: at least one transceiver to receive a packet over a wireless communication channel of a plurality of wireless channels, the packet identifying a source node and a destination node in a multichannel mesh network; and path selection circuitry to combine a first channel-metric matrix associated with the packet's source node and a second channel-metric matrix associated with the packet's destination node to identify a bottleneck channel of the plurality of channels for source-destination pair, the path selection circuitry to select a next-hop node and an associated transmission channel based on metrics of the combined matrix including based on the identified bottleneck channel, wherein the path selection circuitry is configured to generate a channel-metric matrix for destination nodes of the network by construction of paths through the network to the destination nodes on a hop-by-hop basis by separately retaining cost contributions of each of the communication channels in the form of a channel metric vector for each candidate path for use in identifying bottleneck channels for source-destination pairs.