Many efforts have been devoted to maximizing the network throughput with limited channel resources in multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks. It has been believed that the limited spectrum resource can be fully exploited by utilizing partially overlapping channels in addition to nonoverlapping channels in 802.11b/g networks. However, there are only few studies of channel assignment algorithms for partially overlapping channels. In this paper, an extension to the traditional conflict graph model, weighted conflict graph, is proposed to model the interference between wireless links more accurately. Based on this model, we first present a greedy algorithm for partially overlapping channel assignment, and then propose a novel genetic algorithm, which has the potential to obtain better solutions. Through evaluation, we demonstrate that the network performance can be dramatically improved by properly utilizing the partially overlapping channels. In addition, the genetic algorithm ...