Multicast Path Construction Scheme for Multi-Hop Wireless Relay Networks

In recent years, multicast over wireless access networks has become a popular research topic and application. However, if relay nodes are supported, forming an efficient multicast topology is a challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a multi- hop multicast recipient maximization scheme for wireless relay networks. First, we formulate an important problem called Multi-Hop Recipient Maximization (MHRM), which involves allocating resources to the base-station and relay stations efficiently in order to maximize the number of recipients with the given budget and channel conditions. To solve MHRM, we propose a heuristic called Multicast Path Selection (MPS). We prove that MHRM is NP-hard, and also analyze MPS's computational complexity. The results of simulations conducted to evaluate the heuristic's performance demonstrate that, under variant conditions, MPS utilizes bandwidth resources and relay nodes effectively such that it significantly outperforms all existing approaches. To the best of our knowledge, MPS is the only scheme that focuses on this important issue and achieves such a satisfactory performance.