A New Method based on Intelligent Water Drops for Multicast Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

In recent years a new type of wireless networks named wireless mesh networks has drawn the attention of researchers. In order to increase the capacity of mesh network, nodes are equipped with multiple radios tuned on multiple channels emerging multi radio multi channel wireless mesh networks. Therefore, the main challenge of these networks is how to properly assign the channels to the radios. On the other hand, multicast routing makes the delivery of the same content possible from one source to several destinations. For example, video conferencing and distant learning are some applications of multicast routing. The problem of multicast routing coupled with channel assignment is known as an NP hard problem, and hence operation research based methods are not scalable. Most of existing heuristic methods for this problem solve two aforementioned sub-problems in sequence. In this paper, the aim is to propose a new method based on intelligent water drops that solve sub-problem channel assignment in conjunction with multicast routing. Simulation results demonstrate the improvement of throughput, end to end delay, and packet delivery ratio compared to CLLO, CAMF, and LC-MRMC.