Distributed Protocols for Finding Low-Cost Broadcast and Multicast Trees in Wireless Networks

In this paper, we propose and evaluate two distributed protocols for finding low-cost broadcast and multicast trees in wireless networks. The constructed trees can then be used for reliable and energy-efficient data broadcast and multicast in wireless networks. The proposed schemes, referred to as broadcast decremental power (BDP) and multicast decremental power (MDP), evolve a given spanning tree of a network and form other spanning trees with lower costs of broadcast/multicast. In our schemes, the Bellman-Ford (BF) tree is considered as the initial spanning tree. Links in a network are assumed to have some cost based on parameters such as the distance between nodes, link losses, etc. We consider two different network scenarios. In the first one, nodes in the network have adjustable transmission power, and in the second one, the transmission power is fixed. Exhaustive simulation results are provided for the two different communication power scenarios and different network topologies to evaluate the proposed schemes. We show that broadcast/multicast cost is substantially improved over BF and previous well-known centralized schemes such as broadcast incremental power (BIP) and multicast incremental power (MIP), which can be implemented for the adjustable radius model. For the fixed power model, substantial improvement over BF and Network Coding (NC) is observed.