Multicast optimization in broadband adaptive optical wireless networks

Optical wireless networks are expected to have a major role in the evolution of broadband wireless networks and the wireless Internet. This is due in large to the high data rates that optical wireless networks can deliver. The deployment of optical wireless networks in these domains necessitates the need for new techniques and approaches that can secure a place for optical wireless networks in the future of wireless communications. The adaptive model of optical wireless networks is considered a major step towards this goal. It has a great impact on the future of optical wireless networks because of the new design concepts it brought to the optical wireless arena. In this paper, we study the multicast process in adaptive optical wireless networks. We prove the NP-hardness of the multicast optimization problem and accordingly propose two optimization heuristics. Simulation results show that networks adapting our multicast heuristics achieve improvements of up to 42% and 62% on average packet delay and overhead-related metrics, respectively, as compared to networks with conventional multicast.