Minimum Latency Broadcasting in Multiradio, Multichannel, Multirate Wireless Meshes

This paper addresses the problem of "efficientrdquo broadcast in a multiradio, multichannel, multirate wireless mesh network (MR²-MC WMN). In such an MR²-MC WMN, nodes are equipped with multiple radio interfaces, tuned to orthogonal channels, that can dynamically adjust their transmission rate by choosing a modulation scheme appropriate for the channel conditions. We choose "broadcast latency,rdquo defined as the maximum delay between a packet\´s network-wide broadcast at the source and its eventual reception at all network nodes, as the ldquoefficiencyrdquo metric of broadcast performance. We study in this paper how the availability of multirate transmission capability and multiple radio interfaces tuned to orthogonal channels in MR²-MC WMN nodes can be exploited, in addition to the medium\´s ldquowireless broadcast advantagerdquo (WBA), to improve the ldquobroadcast latencyrdquo performance. In this paper, we present four heuristic solutions to our considered problem. We present detailed simulation results for these algorithms for an idealized scheduler, as well as for a practical 802.11-based scheduler. We also study the effect of channel assignment on broadcast performance and show that channel assignment can affect the broadcast performance substantially. More importantly, we show that a channel assignment that performs well for unicast does not necessarily perform well for broadcast/multicast.