On the Load Balancing of Multicast Routing in Multi-Channel Multi-Radio Wireless Mesh Networks with Multiple Gateways

Effective multicast routing schemes alleviate potential congestion on nodes and channels, thereby improving network throughput. This paper studies the problem of finding the shortest load-balanced multicast tree with minimum channel utilization in response to a multicast communication request in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks with multiple gateways. We propose an optimization framework based on mixed integer programming, which minimizes the maximum of the channel utilization in multicast communication. The proposed Load-balanced Multicasting with Multiple Gateways (LMMG) framework benefits from an appropriate node selection in the construction of the multicast tree. LMMG is efficient as it i) constructs the paths between the source and receivers through employment of multiple gateways, thus substantially reducing the interference and usage of resources; ii) simultaneously performs tree construction as well as channel and gateway selection processes. The performance of the proposed scheme is successfully compared to that of an existing method on different simulation scenarios. The results of our simulations demonstrate that balancing channel utilization dramatically enhances the network performance.