Maximizing Broadcast and Multicast Traffic Load through Link-Rate Diversity in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract- This paper studies some of the fundamental chal- WMNs will enable many exciting broadcast/multicast con-lenges and opportunities associated with the network-layer sumer applications (such as IP-TV or local content delivery, broadcast and multicast in a multihop multirate wireless mesh streaming of rich sensor feeds from security/traffic cameras, network (WMN). In particular, we focus on exploiting the ability aminglofer sesor fed from ity/traffim eras, of nodes to perform link-layer broadcasts at different rates (with and multi-player games), and that It is thusimportant to correspondingly different coverage areas). We first show how, in analyze their performance in such mesh environments. Our the broadcast wireless medium, the available capacity at a mesh previous work has focused purely on a a single broadcastflow node for a multicast transmission is not just a function of the and includes [13], where we used link-layer rate diversity to aggregate pre-existing traffic load of other interfering nodes, but reduce the broadcast latency (defined as the maximum delay intricately coupled to the actual (sender, receiver) set and the.. link-layer rate of each individual transmission. We then present betwelthe transmission of a packet by the source node and its and study four alternative heuristic strategies for computing a eventual reception by all receivers) in a single-channel WMN, broadcast tree that not only factors in a flow's traffic rate but and [19], where we exploited the greater spatial concurrency also exploits the wireless broadcast advantage (WBA). Finally, available in multi-radio, multi-channel WMNs. we demonstrate how our insights can be extended to multicast In this paper, we consider the implications of having mul