Bandwidth efficient multicast routing in multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh networks

Multi-channel multi-radio (MCMR) wireless mesh networking is an emerging technology that enables high-throughput networking capability using multiple channels and multiple radios per mesh router. Traditional multicast routing algorithms such as shortest path trees and minimum Steiner trees do not consider the wireless broadcast advantage or the underlying channel assignments (i.e., channel diversity) in a MCMR wireless mesh network (WMN). In this paper, we propose a multicast routing algorithm for MCMR WMNs that takes into account the wireless broadcast advantage and channel diversity in order to minimize the amount of network bandwidth consumed by the routing tree. The algorithm does so by minimizing the number of transmissions required to deliver one packet from the source to all the destinations of a multicast group. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm constructs routing trees having the least number of transmissions when compared with traditional trees such as shortest path trees, minimum Steiner trees, and minimum number of forwarders trees.