A Maximum-Revenue Multicast Routing Problem on Wireless Mesh Networks

Considering a video/audio server deployed on the gateway node of a wireless mesh network, a large amount of clients distributed on various mesh routers may wish to receive multimedia streams from the server simultaneously. In order to offer high-quality of streams, only non-overlapping channels are allowed to be allocated to links to avoid interference. Hence, the problem studied in this paper concerning how to determine a multicast tree which can support the largest number of serviced clients. It is referred as the MPRM problem which can be solved by two approaches. The first approach is to create a conventional multicast tree first, then followed by a channel assignment procedure. We propose a heuristic algorithm called LORCA which can take both load-oriented routing and channel assignment into account at the same time during the formation of a MR tree. That is, we can create a MR tree without generating a multicast tree in advance. The experimental results show that the LORCA outperforms the other approaches in terms of the number of serviced clients.