A Heuristic Energy-Conserving Multicast Routing Protocol for Wireless Multihop Networks

How to provide low energy consumption and high packet delivery ratio are considered the major issues in the protocol design for the wireless multihop networks. The main focus of this paper is to reduce the number of data transmissions such that the energy consumption can be decreased. In the wired networks, the Steiner-Tree is regarded as an optimal approach to construct the multicast structure for specific senders and receivers. However, it is considered an NP-hard problem for achieving the minimum cost multicast tree under the wireless broadcast environment. In this paper, an energy-conserving multicast routing (ECMR) protocol is proposed as a heuristic scheme to reduce the number of relaying nodes for the construction of the multicast mesh. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is implemented on an ARM-based embedded platform for performance evaluation. Comparing with the existing multicast routing protocol, the experimental results show that the proposed ECMR scheme can provide better energy conservation while the packet delivery ratio is still preserved.