OM: Opportunistic Multicast Routing for Wireless Mesh Networks

Opportunistic routing is a recent routing paradigm that achieves high throughput in the face of universally lossy wireless links in wireless mesh networks, likewise, network coding popularly investigated by many institutes is another approach of enhancing the throughput in wireless networks. How to combine the both techniques is an interesting research. To our knowledge, this is still an open issue to implement the multicast routing in wireless mesh networks simultaneously employing the both mechanisms. In this paper, we propose an efficient multicast protocol based on the opportunistic routing and network coding. Additionally, we also provide an ETX (expected number of transmissions) based cost metric formula of the multicast sub-group. Extensive simulation reveals that the performance of the novel presented multicast routing protocol outperforms the conventional multicast routing protocol in wireless mesh networks.