Multiple-radio multiple-channel (MRMC) wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have been increasingly used to construct the wireless backbone infrastructure for ubiquitous Internet access. These networks often face a challenge to satisfy multiple concurrent user requests for data transfers between different source-destination pairs with various performance requirements. We construct analytical network models and formulate such multi-pair data transfers as a rigorous optimization problem. We propose an optimization scheme for cooperative routing and scheduling together with channel assignment to establish a network path for each request through the selection of appropriate link patterns. The performance superiority of the proposed optimization scheme over existing methods is illustrated by simulation-based experiments in various types of mesh networks.