Minimum energy multicast routing for wireless ad-hoc networks with adaptive antennas

Energy conservation is a critical issue in wireless multihop ad-hoc networks, which have nodes powered by batteries only. One major metric for energy conservation is to route a communication session along the routes that require the lowest total energy consumption. We consider wireless ad hoc networks that use adaptive antennas and have limited energy resources. To explore the advantages of power saving offered by the use of adaptive antennas, we consider the case of source initiated multicast traffic. We present a constraint formulation for the MEM (minimum-energy multicast) problem in terms of MILP (mixed integer linear programming) for wireless ad hoc networks. Experiment results show that an optimal solution of the MEM problem using our MILP model can always be obtained in a timely manner for moderately sized network, and it also provides a way to evaluate the realistic performance of different heuristic algorithms.