Fair and reliable multicast routing for wireless mesh networks

Abstract

Multicast is a fundamental routing service in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) due to its many potential applications such as video conferencing, online games, and webcast. Recently, researchers proposed using link-quality-based routing metrics for finding high-throughput paths for multicast routing. However, the performance of such link-quality-based multicast routing is still limited by severe unfairness. Two major artifacts that exist in WMNs are fading which leads to low quality links, and interference which leads to unfair channel allocation in the 802.11 MAC protocol. These artifacts cause the multicast application to behave unfairly with respect to the performance achieved by the multicast receivers. In some applications such as electronic test, competitions and etc. in addition to need for establishing the fairness among the members of the multicast group, it is need to reliable routing with 100% packet delivery ratio (PDR). one of proposed method for increasing PDR is Automatic Repeat Request(ARQ). Previously, numerous multicast protocols based on ARQ have been proposed to improve the packet delivery ratio. Therefore, these ARQ-based protocols can lead to excessive control overhead and drastically reduced throughput. Another technique for increasing PDR is Forward Error Correction (FEC) this method unlike the ARQ prevents of forward control packets and decreases overhead network partly. In this paper, we present methods that in addition of the fairness improvement between the members of multicast group, increase PDR. two methods ARQ-based and FEC-based present in this paper, will be compared the gained fairness and PDR by 802.11.