Rate-Diversity and Resource-Aware Broadcast and Multicast in Multi-rate Wireless Mesh Networks

This paper focuses on the problem of increasing the traffic capacity (volume of admissible traffic) of broadcast and multicast flows in a wireless mesh network (WMN). We study and suggest routing strategies where the process of constructing the forwarding tree considers three distinct features: (a) the ability of individual mesh nodes to perform link-layer broadcasts at multiple rates, (b) the wireless broadcast advantage, whereby a single broadcast transmission covers multiple neighboring receivers and (c) the residual This work was supported by the Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant DP0664791. This work was done when Dr. Bao Hua Liu was employed as a Senior Research Associate at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Archan Misra’s research is continuing through participation in the International Technology Alliance sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the U.K. Ministry of Defence. B. H. Liu Thales Australia—Joint Systems, Garden Island, NSW 2011, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. T. Chou (B) · S. Jha School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia e-mail: [email protected] S. Jha e-mail: [email protected] A. Misra IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, New York, USA e-mail: [email protected] transmission capacity at a WMN node, subject to intereference-based constraints from existing traffic flows in its neighborhood. Our metric of interest is the the total number of broadcast and multicast flows that can be admitted into the network, without resulting in unacceptable degradation in metrics such as packet loss and dissemination latency. Our discrete event simulations show that the broadcast tree construction heuristic which takes both transmission rate and residual bandwidth into account out-performs those that do not. Building on our work on resource-aware broadcast tree construction, we propose a resource-aware multicast tree construction algorithm which exploits the multiple link-layer rates, the wireless broadcast advantage and the amount of resources available. Simulation results show that this algorithm performs better than heuristics based on pruning a broadcast tree or shortest path trees.