Performance Evaluation of a Multicast Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks Considering Network Load

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) can provide wide range Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) area by connecting Access Points (APs) of WLANs each other using radio communications. A routing protocol is very important to keep communication quality over radio multi-hop communications because radio waves are impacted much by surrounding environment. When we use multi user shared applications such as a video conference and an IP phone, it is predicted that a large amount of traffic flows on networks. Therefore, we should consider network loads to use these applications. In this paper, we propose a multicast routing protocol for WMNs which considers network loads and hop count. The proposed protocol calculates Load Evaluation Value (LEV) of all candidate routes using their queue length and hop count. After that, it selects one route which has lowest LEV as a transmission route. As a result, by using the proposed method, it is possible to avoid high load routes. Furthermore, we evaluate performance of the proposed protocol and MAODV by simulation. In the simulation results, we show that the proposed protocol has better performance than MAODV.