Approximate minimum-energy multicasting in wireless ad hoc networks

A wireless ad hoc network consists of mobile nodes that are equipped with energy-limited batteries. As mobile nodes are battery-operated, an important issue in such a network is to minimize the total power consumption for each operation. Multicast is one of fundamental operations in any modern telecommunication network including wireless ad hoc networks. Given a multicast request consisting of a source node and a set of destination nodes, the problem is to build a minimum-energy multicast tree for the request such that the total transmission power consumption in the tree is minimized. Since the problem in a symmetric wireless ad hoc network is NP-complete, we instead devise an approximation algorithm with provable approximation guarantee. The approximation of the solution delivered by the proposed algorithm is within a constant factor of the best-possible approximation achievable unless P = NP.