New Algorithm for Minimum Multicast Time Problem in Wireless Sensor Networks

Given a wired network of processors, and a source node that needs to broadcast a message to all other processors in the network, the minimum broadcast time problem is to find a scheme that accomplishes the broadcast in a minimum number of time rounds under the constraint that at each time round, no processor can forward the received message to more than one of its neighbors in the network. This NP-hard problem has been extensively studied in literatures. In this paper we focus on a variant of the minimum broadcast time problem: the minimum multicast time problem in wireless sensor networks under collision-free data transmission model. The goal of the problem is to multicast a message from the source node to a set of destination nodes in a minimum number of time rounds. This problem remains NP-hard even in the Euclidean plane and the current best approximation algorithm has performance ratio of 41. In this paper we propose a new algorithm that has performance ratio of 15.