Abstract: The multi-rate broadcast is a special problem in multi-rate wireless mesh networks. The broadcast tree formulation algorithms based on the minimal connected dominating set(MCDS)，which is commonly used, can not be directly applied in a multi-rate wireless mesh network. We presented a minimized latency broadcast formulation for multirate wireless mesh networks, and proposed a novel distributed formulation of a multi rate broadcast tree algorithm. It determined the proper broadcast rate only depending on the local topology information. Extensive results demonstrated that the proposed algorithm can reduce the network wide broadcast latency significantly, compared with the existing distributed algorithms.

Key words: Multi-rate broadcast, Wireless mesh network, Broadcast latency, Distributed algorithm