Energy-aware location-aided multicast routing in sensor networks

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have drawn much research interest. In this paper, we explore the problem of location-aided multicast routing for WSN. A sensor network of nodes with location information and limited energy is considered. As the problem is NP-hard, we propose four heuristic schemas to construct the geomulticast routing tree, namely, single branch regional flooding, single branch multicast tree, cone-based forwarding area multicast tree and MST-based single branch multicast tree. The algorithms of setting up multicast tree, which are distributed and energy efficient, are discussed in detail and compared. Extensive simulations have been conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed routing schemas. Simulation results have shown that when constructing geographic multicast tree in sensor networks, less messages must be transmitted in our schemas.