Predictive Energy-Efficient Multicast for Large-Scale Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Energy-efficient multicast routing is of primary concern for mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). However, none of existing energy-efficient multicast algorithms is applicable to large-scale MANETs, either due to their complexity (which is either NP-hard or polynomial with respect to the network size), or due to the huge overhead caused by frequent exchanges of location information. To solve the scalability and overhead issues, we propose the Predictive .Energy-efficient Multicast Algorithm (PEMA) which exploits statistical properties of the network, as opposed to relying on route details or network topology. The running time of PEMA depends on the multicast group size, not network size; this makes PEMA fast enough even for MANETs consisting of 1000 or more nodes. Simulation results show that PEMA not only results in significant energy savings compared to other existing algorithms, but also attains good packet delivery ratio in mobile environments.