Network coding is a promising technology proven to improve the performance of wireless networks. To successfully design a quality-of-service (QoS)-satisfied routing protocol with network coding, the bandwidth consumption of a coding host should be determined. Furthermore, coding opportunities should be increased to improve network capacity. Nevertheless, it is challenging to determine whether a host can be a coding host and to determine the bandwidth consumption of a coding host in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET). In this paper, we first present and define the coding conditions to identify a coding host. The bandwidth consumption of a coding host is then estimated under the contention-based wireless networks with a random access mechanism. Finally, we propose a bandwidth-satisfied and coding-aware multicast routing protocol (BCMRP). By taking into account the residual bandwidth of the carrier-sense neighbors of the forwarders, the proposed protocol can satisfy the bandwidth requirements of the requested flow and other ongoing flows. As a consequence of considering coding opportunities in multicast tree construction, the proposed multicast protocol can reduce the total bandwidth consumption. The simulation results show that BCMRP outperforms the prior multicast routing protocols in receiving ratio, admission ratio, and total bandwidth consumption.

Since the multi-rate enhancements have been implemented in wireless ad hoc networks (MANETs), QoS-constrained multicast protocols for multimedia communication should be adapted to exploit them fully for using more efficiently the limited resources. To build a multicast tree with delay-guaranteed, one-hop delay and end-to-end delay must be known. The one-hop delay is the transmission time at a given link connecting two neighboring hosts, and the end-to-end delay is the time taken for a data packet from a specific source to reach the destination node. However, how to calculate the above two delays using the IEEE 802.11 MAC is still a challenging problem, because the radio channel is shared among neighbors. Further, the multi-rate enhancements make it more difficult since the neighboring relation among hosts is varied with the transmission rates. In this paper, we first propose a method to estimate the one-hop delay based on varied transmission rates by monitoring the sensed busy/idle ratio of shared channel. Then, by its aid, another method is proposed to compute the end-to-end delay. Finally, we integrate the above two methods with a typical multicast routing protocol, ODMRP, for constructing a delay-guaranteed multicast protocol. Simulation results show that the proposed method obtains more precise one-hop delay than a very recently work. Besides, the integrated protocol provides better delay guarantee than the existing protocol when the multicast traffic has delay requirement.