Multicasting in Energy Aware Mobile Backbone Based Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The synthesis of efficient and scalable multicasting schemes for wireless ad hoc networks is a challenging task. In this paper, we present three multicast algorithms that employ a dynamically synthesized energy-aware mobile backbone network (E-MBN) to achieve efficient message distribution among members of the multicast groups. E-MBN incorporates a power saving mechanism that allows inactive nodes to transition into sleep state to conserve energy, and elects nodes with higher energy reserves as backbone nodes (BNs) to extend network lifetime. Using the synthesized backbone network (Bnet), we have a hierarchical networking architecture that enables a multicast protocol to achieve low control overhead and high transmission efficiency. The multicast algorithms under investigation are: (1) Bnet flooding multicast algorithm (BFMA); (2) shared backbone multicast subnetwork (SBMS); and (3) dynamically adaptive hybrid multicast algorithm (HMA). We study the throughput (per-watt) performance efficiency of the E-MBN based multicast protocols through analytical and simulation evaluations. For fair comparison, we defined and implemented an extended version of ODMRP with power saving mechanism (ODMRP-PS). Our results demonstrate the enhanced performance achieved by the E-MBN based multicast algorithms when compared to ODMRP-PS, and provide performance comparisons for these algorithms.