Packet Routing and Frame Length Optimization in Wireless Mesh Networks with Multicast Communications

The paper considers multi-hop wireless mesh networks that serve multicast periodic packet traffic. The packets from each packet stream are generated at the stream's source node and traverse a number of wireless nodes in order to reach their multiple destination nodes. Packet periodicity means that a common repeatable frame of time slots is defined and that the packets to be transmitted arrive at the source of each packet stream at the beginning of each consecutive frame. The novel element is that the packet transmitted by the node is simultaneously received by multiple listening nodes. The particular problem dealt with in the paper consists in minimization of the frame length (which is equivalent to packet throughput maximization) together with optimization of the multicast trees to be used by the packet streams. For that, we develop an integer-programming optimization model and the related near-optimal algorithm whose (very good) effectiveness is illustrated with numerical results.