The multicast capacity of large multihop wireless networks

We consider wireless ad hoc networks with a large number of users. Subsets of users might be interested in identical information, and so we have a regime in which several multicast sessions may coexist. We first calculate an upper-bound on the achievable transmission rate per multicast flow as a function of the number of multicast sources in such a network. We then propose a simple comb-based architecture for multicast routing which achieves the upper bound in an order sense under certain constraints. Compared to the approach of constructing a Steiner tree to decide multicast paths, our construction achieves the same order-optimal results while requiring little location information and no computational overhead. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.2.1 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Network Architecture and Design--wireless communication General Terms Theory and Algorithms Keywords Ad hoc networks, multicast flows, Steiner tree, asymptotic capacity

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: Srinivas Shakkottai, Xin Liu, R. Srikant
• Keywords: Ad Hoc Networks, MOBIHOC 2007, Multicast Flows, Multicast Paths, Wireless Networks