Energy-efficient broadcast and multicast trees for reliable wireless communication

We define energy-efficient broadband and multicast schemes for reliable communication in multi-hop wireless networks. Unlike previous techniques, the choice of neighbors in the broadband and multicast trees in these schemes, are based not only on the link distance, but also on the error rates associated with the link. Our schemes can be implemented using both positive and negative acknowledgement based reliable broadcast techniques in the link layer. Through simulations, we show that our scheme achieves up to 45% improvement over previous schemes on realistic 100-node network topologies. A positive acknowledgment based implementation is preferred. Our simulations show that the additional benefits of a positive acknowledgement based implementation is marginal (1-2%). Therefore a negative acknowledgement based implementation of our schemes is equally applicable in constructing energy-efficient reliable and multicast data delivery paths.