Multi-path Routing for Video Streaming in Multi-radio Multi-channel Wireless Mesh Networks

Multi-radio multi-channel (MRMC) is a promising approach to relieve the overload caused by the explosive growth of video streaming traffic in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Previous studies have shown that in MRMC WMNs, network capacity can be increased significantly by proper design of channel assignment and routing algorithm. Multi-path routing can make good use of the network capacity improvement of MRMC WMNs. Multi-path routing has been applied in wired and wireless networks for load balancing or congestion control. However, it remains a challenge in MRMC WMNs. In this paper, we first discuss how to find multiple high-quality paths from source to destination while considering the interference between each other. Then we focus on the rate allocation among multiple paths and formulate it as a max-min problem which can be transformed to a linear programming (LP) problem. Finally, we propose a joint multi-path discovery and rate allocation algorithm. We evaluate this algorithm through simulations. Results show that our algorithm not only increases the network capacity, but also keeps the average end-to-end delay over all video streaming sessions at a low level.