Multicast Communication in Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks
Wireless Mesh Networks are a new emerging technology that is required to provide high quality service to end-users as ??last-mile?? of the Internet. In such networks, most nodes are either stationary or minimally mobile and do not have power constrains. There are three types of nodes in mesh networks: gateways (access point), mesh routers and mesh clients. Gateways enable the integration of mesh networks with the Internet. Mesh routers form the mesh backbone, and mesh clients are usually the end users. Compared with their single-hop counterpart, wireless LANs, mesh networks are self-organized with the nodes automatically establishing ad hoc networks and maintaining their connectivity, which provides more reliability as well as larger coverage.

Our research focuses on the multicast communication, which provides efficient data distribution among a group of nodes in the wireless mesh networks. However, unlike ad hoc networks and sensor networks, where the multicast algorithms put much effort on energy efficient and optimal route discovery, throughput maximization conflicting with scarce bandwidth has the paramount priority in the wireless mesh networks. Traditional multicast protocols for wireless networks assume that each node is equipped with one interface, while the mesh networks provide the nodes with multiple interfaces and multi-channel which can improve the system throughput. We study how to design a multicast protocol for mesh networks that has the following characteristics: i) it improves the system throughput by taking advantage of multi-channel and multi-interface, and ii) it assigns all the available channels instead of just non-overlapping channels. We propose two multicast algorithms which build efficient multicast trees and use dedicated channels assignment strategies to reduce the interference and maximize the throughput.

Papers:
  • G. Zeng, B. Wang, Y. Ding, L. Xiao, and M. Mutka, "Multicast Algorithms for Multichannel Wireless Mesh Networks", ICNP 2007
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