An architecture with QoS support for application layer multicasting over wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks are being widely deployed around the world as a mean to provide low-cost access to the Internet. The high capacity at mesh routers nodes allows applications such as real time multicast over WMNs. In light of the slow development of IP multicast and the rise of peer-to-peer communication, implementing multicast capability at the application layer is imminent. QoS support for application layer multicast over WMNs is challenging due to the architecture of the overlay networks, characteristics of the wireless medium, and end users limited bandwidth efficiency. We argue for ring-based overlay multicast scheme with support from wireless mesh routers for the multicast applications. We demonstrate, using extensive simulations, that this approach has excellent potential to improve the performance of the peer-to-peer multicast applications in a wireless setting; specifically we focus on many-to-many real time multimedia applications but other applications can also be supported by this approach.