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Improved heuristics for multicast routing in wireless mesh networks

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Abstract

Multicast is a communication technique that allows a source to transmit data to a set of recipients in an efficient manner. Therefore, the primary objective of a multicast routing protocol would be to minimize number of transmissions to conserve bandwidth. The problem of computing multicast trees with minimal bandwidth consumption is similar to Steiner tree problem and has shown to be NP-complete. So, heuristic based algorithms are suitable to approximate such bandwidth optimal trees. This paper proposes a multicast routing protocol based on minimum number of transmission trees using an heuristic approach. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm offers better performance over existing protocols, even in the worst-case scenario when the set of multicast receivers are sparsely distributed across the network.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna, Patna, 800013, Bihar, India

    Rakesh Matam & Somanath Tripathy

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  1. Rakesh Matam
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  2. Somanath Tripathy
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Correspondence to Somanath Tripathy.

Appendix

Appendix

Opeartion of EMRAW by example

The operation of the proposed multicast routing protocol is presented herein with the help of an example as shown in Fig. 3. For simplicity, we consider a source S and set of receivers {R 1, R 2, R 3} spanned across the network. The request phase begins when a Join Request is flooded by S across the network. The intermediate node that receives this Join Request, propagates it after creating a corresponding route entry. Receiver nodes R 1, R 2 and R 3 broadcast the corresponding Join Reply, after initializing the next-hop, hop-count and effective-hop-count fields appropriately.

Without loss of generality, we assume that the multicast receivers R 1, R 2 and R 3 respond to a Join Request that has traversed the shortest path from S, and received through nodes I 7, I 5 and I 10 respectively. Therefore, R 1, R 2 and R 3 broadcast their respective Join Replies with next-hop address set to I 7, I 5 and I 10. These nodes, in turn broadcast their Join Replies through nodes I 4, I 2 and I 6 as next-hop, after decrementing and incrementing the hop-count and effective-hop-count, respectively. Each node that receives a Join Reply with next-hop address matching with its own address, subsequently act as potential forwarders while processing Join Replies received from other receivers.

Free nodes like I 8, that receive a broadcasted Join Reply from I 7, decrements and increments the hop-count and effective-hop count respectively, before broadcasting the Join Reply. Potential forwarder I 5 that receives a Join Reply for R 1 from I 8, processes it and increments only hop-count and propagates a Join Reply through P as the next-hop node. Similarly, R 2 and I 10 process a Join Reply received through I 9 for R 3 and R 2 respectively. Since, R 2 is a receiver, it acts as potential forwarder while processing Join Reply for R 3, received through I 9.

Finally, when S receives a set of Join Replies from I 1, I 2 and I 3, it determines the best possible route that minimizes overall transmission count with the help of effective-hop-count values received through each forwarder for all the receivers. It then sends a route commit message through a selected node. In this case, a route through I 2 is selected as the Join Replies received through it has lowest effective-hop-count and therefore require fewer transmissions.

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Matam, R., Tripathy, S. Improved heuristics for multicast routing in wireless mesh networks. Wireless Netw 19, 1829–1837 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-013-0575-z

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