Radio Band Utilization Improvement in Wireless Mesh Networks for Multicast Routing

This paper addresses the cross-layer design for multicast routing in Multi-Radio Multi-Channel Wireless Mesh Networks (MRMC-WMNs) with directional antennas. WMNs have a limited capacity because of existence of interference between the wireless links. This issue becomes more crucial in the multicast communications. Directional antennas can focus the transmission power to the limited sector. Thus, equipping the wireless nodes with these antennas leads to degrade interference. This paper proposes two cross-layer algorithms named “Directional Multicast Tree Construction (DMTC)” and the “Directional Interference-aware Multicast Tree Construction (DIMTC)” to solve the aforementioned problems. In the first algorithm, we jointly consider the channel diversity; the wireless broadcast advantage and the directional antenna technology to reduce number of transmissions in the routing trees. In the second one, in addition to above factors we use interference aware path selection factor to eliminate the interference among the multicast sessions. This scheme is aiming at improving the utilization of radio resources reducing both number of transmissions and interference, at the same time. Simulation results demonstrate that our schemes are more efficient than other existing schemes as well.