An optimal TDMA-based MAC scheduling for the minimum energy multicast in wireless ad hoc networks

Energy conservation is a critical issue in wireless ad hoc networks since batteries are the only limited-life energy source to power the nodes. The introduction of real-time applications has posed additional challenges. Transmission of video and imaging data requires both energy and QoS aware routing in order to ensure efficient usage of the networks. We only consider "bandwidth" as the QoS in TDMA-based wireless ad hoc networks that use omni-directional antennas and have limited energy resources. We present a constraint formulation model for the QoS-MEM (QoS-aware minimum energy multicast) problem in terms of mixed integer linear programming (MILP). It can be used for an optimal solution of the QoS-MEM problem, and it also provides a way to evaluate the realistic performance of different heuristic algorithms.