Localized minimum-latency broadcasting in multi-radio multi-rate wireless mesh networks

We address the problem of minimizing the worst-case broadcast delay in "multi-radio multi-channel multi-rate wireless mesh networks" (MR 2-MC WMN) in a distributed and localized fashion. Efficient broadcasting in such networks is especially challenging due to the desirability of exploiting the "wireless broadcast advantage" (WBA), the interface-diversity, the channel-diversity and the ratediversity offered by these networks. We propose a framework that calculates a set of forwarding nodes and transmission rate at these forwarding nodes irrespective of the broadcast source. Thereafter, a forwarding tree is constructed taking into consideration the source of broadcast. Our broadcasting algorithms are distributed and utilize locally available information. We present a detailed performance evaluation of our distributed and localized algorithm, and demonstrate that our algorithm can greatly improve broadcast performance by exploiting the rate, interface and channel diversity of MR2-MC WMNs and match the performance of centralized algorithms proposed in literature while utilizing only limited two-hop neighborhood information. © 2008 IEEE.