Low latency multimedia broadcast in multi-rate wireless meshes

Abstract

In a multi-rate wireless network, a node can dynamically adjust its link transmission rate by switching between different modulation schemes. For the current IEEE802.11a/b/g standards, this rate adjustment is limited to unicast traffic only while multicast and broadcast traffic is always transmitted at the lowest possible rate. In this paper, we consider a novel type of multi-rate mesh networks where a node can dynamically adjust its link layer multicast rates to its neighbours. In particular, we consider the problem of realising low latency network-wide broadcast in this type of multi-rate wireless meshes. We will first show that the multi-rate broadcast problem is significantly different from the single-rate case. We will then present an algorithm for achieving low latency broadcast in a multi-rate mesh which exploits both wireless broadcast advantage and the multi-rate nature of the network.