Efficient Multicast Algorithms for Multichannel Wireless Mesh Networks

The wireless mesh network is an emerging technology that provides high quality service to end users as the "Last mile" of the Internet. Furthermore, multicast communication is a key technology for wireless mesh networks. Multicast provides efficient data distribution among a group of nodes. However, unlike other wireless networks, such as sensor networks and MANETs, where multicast algorithms are designed to be energy efficient and to achieve optimal route discovery among mobile nodes, wireless mesh networks need to maximize throughput. This paper proposes two multicast algorithms: the Level Channel Assignment (LCA) algorithm and the Multi-Channel Multicast (MCM) to improve the throughput for multichannel and multi-interface mesh networks.