A New Method based on Intelligent Water Drops for Multicast Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks

In recent years a new type of wireless networks named wireless mesh networks has drawn the attention of researchers. In order to increase the capacity of mesh network, nodes are equipped with multiple radios tuned on multiple channels emerging multi radio multi channel wireless mesh networks. Therefore, the main challenge of these networks is how to properly assign the channels to the radios. On the other hand, multicast routing makes the delivery of the same content possible from one source to several destinatios. For example, video confereceing and distant learning are some applications of multicast routing. The problem of multicast routing coupled with channel assignment is known as an NP hard problem, and hence operation research based methods are not scalable. Most of exsisting heuristic methods for this problem solve two aformetnioned sub-problems in sequence. In this paper, the aim is to propose a new method based on intelligent water drops that solve sub-problem channel assignemt in conjuction with multicast roung. Simulation results demonstrate the improvement of throghput, end to end delay, and packet delivery ratio compared to CLLO, CAMF, and LC-MRMC.