A Survey on Multicast Routing Approaches in Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) which mediates the broadband Internet access, have been recently received many attentions by the researchers. In order to increase capacity in these networks, nodes are equipped with multiple radios tuned on multiple channels emerging multi radio multi-channel WMNs (MRMC WMNs). Therefore, a vital challenge that poses in MRMC WMNs is how to properly assign channels to the radios. On the other hand, multicast routing lets the delivery of data possibly from one source to several destinations which makes it suitable for multimedia applications such as video conferencing and distant learning. In this paper, different methods of multicast routing in WMNs are investigated. Moreover, the existing methods are classified from the viewpoints of management style (centralized / decentralized) and achieving optimal solution (heuristic / meta-heuristic / operation research).