A Source-Based Multicast Scheme in IEEE 802.16 Mesh Mode

WiMAX based on IEEE 802.16 is known as one of effective technologies for transmission of multimedia to groups of receivers. There are two operational modes in WiMAX: point to multi point (PMP) for single hop transmission and a mesh node for multi-hop transmission. The current standard only defines unicast transmission under mesh mode thus the performance is deteriorated for multimedia applications with multicast nature. In this paper, we first propose a mechanism for source-based tree topology construction aiming at facilitating multicast transmission in WiMAX mesh network. In the proposed approach, the multicast tree is constructed considering available link's bandwidth and multicast group members. After constructing the multicast tree we propose a novel scheduling algorithm to improve the transmission throughout. In the proposed scheduling algorithm a parent node uses broadcasting when the number of its children belonging to a multicast group excesses a threshold. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed multicast mechanism improves multicast transmission efficiency and reduces scheduling time slots noticeably in comparison to the approach mandated by the IEEE 802.16 standard.