Efficient multicast and channel assignment in multi-channel wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Some wireless network protocols do not consider channel assignment and signal interference issues while constructing the multicast distribution tree and hence do not use full capacity of the network. Some others consume all channels for multicast traffic leaving no free channel for other traffic types. We propose a distributed scheme called Efficient Wireless Multicast (EWM) for constructing multicast tree in multichannel multi-interface wireless mesh networks (MIMC-WMN) which carefully selects relay nodes and assign orthogonal radio channels to them. EWM also tries to minimize path delay when selecting relay nodes. The resulted tree is efficient in terms of throughput and end-to-end delay. EWM also employs the broadcast nature of the wireless media to reduce the number of relay nodes. It makes use of only three orthogonal channels resulting in no interference and hence high throughput.