Efficient Opportunistic Multicast via Tree Backbone for Wireless Mesh Networks

In this paper, we propose a new opportunistic multicast protocol to improve multicast throughput in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN). It builds upon opportunistic routing (OR) strategies that have been designed to improve unicast throughput in wireless networks. The key concept in our multicast protocol is a tree backbone. Our tree backbone protocol represents a tradeoff between traditional structured multicast protocols where a complete multicast tree is constructed and unstructured protocols where multicast is treated as a collection of unicasts. Tree backbone selects multiple nodes as intermediate nodes. Each pair of upstream and downstream nodes may be multiple hops away, and packet delivery between them takes advantage of OR. For single-rate WMNs, we show that constructing an efficient tree backbone that minimizes the number of transmissions is NP-hard, and we devise one effective heuristic algorithm for it. For multi-rate WMNs, we investigate the inherent rate-distance tradeoff and propose a Euclidean opportunistic multicast protocol by devising a Euclidean tree backbone as well as an efficient rate selection scheme to minimize the number of transmissions. In our simulations, our tree backbone multicast protocols outperform both the completely structured traditional multicast protocols and the completely unstructured unicast-based protocols augmented with OR in both throughput and delay.