A Maximum-Residual Multicast Protocol for Large-Scale Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Routing problems have become highly challenging because of the popularity of mobile devices. This paper targets power-aware routing when network topologies and data traffic may change quickly in an unpredictable way. We propose a distributed algorithm and its realization to maximize the minimum residual energy of all the nodes for each multicast, where no global information is assumed to be efficiently maintained at any node. A transient multicast tree is established on demand and derived based on the autonomous decisions of intermediate nodes. We prove that the derived tree is loop-free and theoretically optimal in the maximization of minimum residual energy. The performance of the proposed protocol was evaluated over NS2 with a series of simulations for which we have very encouraging results.