Wireless Mesh Networks with multiple channels and multiple radios on the mesh routers, have a great potential to increase the overall capacity of the network. To obtain the complete benefit of the increased capacity of such networks, efficient Channel Assignment (CA) and Link Scheduling (LS) algorithms are extremely important. A static CA and LS may not be optimal, in terms of utilization of underlying network resources, for every traffic demand in the network. In this paper, we find the optimal CA and LS for the given traffic demand by formulating an MILP by considering the traffic demand for each source-destination pairs, with the objective of maximizing the total achieved throughput of the network. We also propose a simple, but effective Load aware Channel Assignment and Link Scheduling (LoCALS), a polynomially bound heuristic algorithm for CA and LS. We show that LoCALS performs on par with the optimal solution. Finally, we compare LoCALS with a distributed channel assignment algorithm which is unaware of the traffic demand, in order to demonstrate the importance of considering the traffic demand for CA and LS. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.