A Distributed Relay Selection Algorithm for Cooperative Multicast in Wireless Mesh Networks

Recently, wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have drawn significant attention from academia and industry as a fast, easy, and inexpensive solution for broadband wireless access. In WMNs, many important applications, such as mobile TV and video/audio conferencing, require the support of multicast. In this paper, we address the issue of multicast cooperative communications over WMN. Specifically, we identify the selection of relay nodes as a critical step to the success of cooperative multicast. To solve this problem, we develop the concept of in-group/out-group cooperation as well as a distributed relay selection algorithm for the mobile computing environment. Extensive simulation results show that our approach can efficiently mitigate the multicast transmission errors in wireless mesh networks.