MeshCAST: A Multi-channel Mult-interface Multicast Protocol for Mesh Metworks

Wireless Mesh Networks have emerged as one of the new hot topics in wireless communications. Based on Multihop infrastructure, wireless mesh networks offer increased reliability, coverage, and reduced equipment costs. Equipping wireless routers with multiple radios further improves the capacity by transmitting over multiple radios simultaneously using multiple channels. Multicast is one of the areas in which WMN will play a key role in future wireless networks. In this paper, we present a multichannel multi interface multicast protocol for mesh networks called MeshCast. Our solution is based on the construction of a multicast tree for a source and a multicast group. This tree is used to forward packets and it maintained for link breaking and pruning. MeshCast improves the capacity of multi-channel wireless networks by using multiple interfaces. We studied its performance using the simulator NS3. Our simulations show that the proposed approach offers a good performance when using multi channel multi interface.