Interference-aware multicast scheduling in WiMAX mesh networks

In this paper we propose a multicast scheduling algorithm for WiMAX mesh networks. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of minislot spatial reuse thus allows concurrent interference-free transmissions. Furthermore, the parent nodes that have an enough number of children (more than a predetermined threshold) belonging to a multicast group, broadcasts the data. Therefore, the number of required scheduling slots is reduced which in turn leads to a better performance in terms of delay and throughput. The proposed multicast scheduling algorithm can be applied to both source-based and rendezvous-based multicast tree topologies. Results of simulation study show the efficiency of the proposed multicast scheduling algorithm compared to the other multicast scheduling algorithms.