Multicasting in Wireless Mesh Networks: Challenges and Opportunities

Wireless mesh network (WMN) is a multi-hop wireless network with partial mesh topology, which can replace wired infrastructure backbone in a traditional wireless network, to wireless. It is an exciting new technology that has applications in defense, metro-area Internet access, and disaster management. WMNs are believed to be a highly promising technology and will play an increasingly important role in future generation wireless mobile networks. This paper presents a survey on multicast protocols in wireless mesh networks and factors to be addressed while designing a multicast protocol for wireless mesh networks, like availability of mesh router infrastructure, effect of multiple channels and channel assignment, load balancing, selection of multicast routing metric, effect of guaranteed quality of service, and cross layer optimization.