PEMSE: A high-throughput multicast routing protocol for multi-rate IEEE802.11

In the context of multi-rate communication, the throughput-based multicast routing that aims at maximizing the end-to-end throughput is very different from the commonly adopted delay-based multicast routing that aims at minimizing the end-to-end delay. Definitely, the delay-based approach is not suitable for applications that need to transfer large amounts of data (e.g. grid applications). In view of that, we introduce in this paper the first distributed routing strategy that allows high-throughput multicast in multi-rate IEEE802.11 networks. The new mesh-based routing, called the Protocol for End-to-end Multicast Session Efficiency (PEMSE), exploits the rate-diversity (MUD) and on the broadcast-nature of the wireless medium (WBA). It aims at: i) considering the effect of the number of transmissions/retransmissions, required to exploit the MUD, on the end-to-end multicast throughput and ii) establishing the routing structure that guarantees the best end-to-end multicast throughput. Simulations prove that PEMSE achieves considerable throughput improvement compared to the PUMA [11] routing protocol. They also show that PEMSE attains reasonable delays and delivery ratios.