Consecutive geographic multicasting protocol in large-scale wireless sensor networks

For multicast applications with large-scale groups in large-scale wireless sensor networks, it is an important issue for energy saving in geographic multicasting both to obtain location information of destination nodes and to construct the geographic multicast tree efficiently. To address this issue, there have been proposed global search based hierarchical geographic multicasting protocols. Such protocols divide the whole network into many multiple small areas and a leader node in each area manages the location information of destination nodes in its area. However, since they find location information of such leader nodes through global location search at a source, they consume much energy. Also, since they exploit hierarchical geographic multicast trees that have a higher tree consisting of the source node and the leader nodes and a lower tree consisting of a leader node and destination nodes in the area of the leader node, they consume more energy due to data detouring. To solve the problems of global search based hierarchical geographic multicasting protocols, we propose a local search based consecutive geographic multicasting scheme. Through avoiding the global search and removing the data detouring, the proposed protocol saves much energy of sensor nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is superior to the existing protocols.