Real-Time Multicasting Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Real-time data delivery to a multicast group may be defined as data dissemination to each member in the multicast group within the desired time deadline. The hardest part of this mission is to enforce this 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 may call it the critical distance. This must be most important constraint for real-time multicasting. That is, the delivery distance from a source to each member must not be longer than the critical distance even by any reason. However, since the traditional multicasting protocols lay the strong emphasis only on communication cost rather than distance, they may violate the real-time constraint related to the critical distance. In this paper, we propose a novel multicasting scheme satisfying the real-time constraint.