A generic conflict-aware multicast routing overlay for wireless networks

Multicast routing is a fundamental issue in wireless networks and related routing strategies should select the lowest number of parallel conflicting transmissions. However, current works on this problem accounts only for conflicts occurring within the transmission ranges of the nodes. Particularly, no work is interested in studying conflicting transmissions while using multi-rate concurrent multicast transmissions. In this paper, we develop a conflict-aware routing model, which aims at increasing the probability of scheduling conflict-free transmissions and improving the throughput by extremely exploiting the network availabilities in terms of link capacities, using different rates. The suggested conflict-aware routing strategy is implemented by means of a set of greedy heuristic algorithms. This strategy, called the CAware routing strategy, is “generic” because it can be coupled with any throughput-based routing metric or any routing structure. The proposed algorithms are studied to justify their performance trends and to show that conflict-awareness gives considerable routing benefits.