An opportunistic multicast routing protocol for wireless mesh networks

Opportunistic routing has been shown to outperform traditional routing protocols which use a pre-determined next hop. Most of the opportunistic routing protocols proposed to-date are for unicast while few multicast opportunistic routing protocols have been proposed. This paper proposes an opportunistic multicast routing protocol. The protocol addresses the problem of selection and prioritisation of relay candidates to reduce the overall number of transmissions. It also addresses the problem of reducing protocol overheads. We compare the performance of our proposed protocol against an existing opportunistic multicast routing protocol, and find that our proposed protocol has a higher packet delivery rate and lower number of transmissions per packet delivered.