Energy-Efficient Multicast Protocol for Real-Time Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy is one of the most important resources in battery-powered wireless sensor networks. Unfortunately, it is ignored in prior multicast works which aim to achieve real-time data dissemination. In this paper, a novel energy-efficient multicast protocol is proposed for real-time wireless sensor networks. We introduce virtual multicast sector to adaptively divide the region according to the distribution of multicast destinations. Furthermore, an efficient scheme of constructing multicast tree is presented, which can reduce the number of hops in multicast tree. Simulation results show that the proposed multicast protocol outperforms significantly prior work on energy-efficiency for real-time wireless sensor networks.