Interference-Aware Multicast in Wireless Mesh Networks with Directional Antennas

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have recently emerged as a promising broadband access infrastructure for next-generation wireless networking. Several approaches that exploit directional antennas have been proposed in the literature to increase the performance of WMNs. In this paper, we study the interference optimization multicast problem in WMNs where nodes are equipped with directional antennas. Interference can make a significant impact on the performance of multi-hop wireless networks. Directional transmissions can greatly reduce radio interference, increase spatial reuse, and enable more efficient MAC designs. We first present the definition of interference with directional transmissions that are suitable for designing multicast algorithms, and formulate minimum interference multicast problems using a linear programming model. We then propose a heuristic algorithm to solve the problem. Our model and algorithm are good for both single multicast session and multiple multicast sessions. Multicast routing found by our interference-aware algorithm tends to have less channel collisions.