Multicast Protocol for Real-Time Data Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Real-time data dissemination to a multicast group is data delivery to each member in the multicast group within the desired time deadline. The hardest aspect of this mission is to enforce the real-time constraint in the communication between a source and the furthest member since an end-to-end delay is proportional to a physical distance in wireless sensor networks. We call it the critical distance. The critical distance should be most important constraint for real-time multicasting. That is, the delivery distance from a source to each member should not be longer than the critical distance even by any reason. However, since the traditional multicast protocols lay the strong emphasis only on the overall communication cost rather than delivery distance to each member, they may violate the real-time constraint related to the critical distance. In this letter, we propose a novel multicast protocol for real-time data dissemination.