Efficient multi-flow multicasting in wireless multi-hop networks

Wireless transmission resources are limited for high performance wireless multimedia applications. This paper theoretically studies a new capacity aggregation policy in both single-hop and multi-hop wireless networks with the motivation of ameliorating the trade-off between limited channel resources and multiple flow transmission. The capacity aggregation policy aggregates residual channel capacity that remains unused by the previous flow scheduling policy in order to future increase the number of performance guaranteed multimedia flows. We then proposed a novel efficient multi-flow multicasting algorithm to apply the policies of flow scheduling and capacity aggregation to practical multimedia multicasting so as to quickly and reliably admit extra multicasting traffic in a wireless network. Finally, we use NS2 simulations to evaluate the studied policy and the EMMT algorithm. Our simulation results prove the effectiveness of our schemes in improving the ability of networks to admit more multimedia flows.