Minimum-energy multicast routing in static wireless ad hoc networks

Wireless mobile ad hoc stations have limited battery capacity. One major performance metric used to evaluate broadcast and multicast trees is the lowest total energy consumption. We extend our previous work by presenting a more general study from the broadcast to multicast case, since the multicast tree obtained by pruning some broadcast tree does not give good performance once the multicast group sizes are small. We present a constraint formulation in terms of MILP (mixed integer linear programming), which can be used for an optimal solution of the minimum-energy multicast (MEM) problem in wireless ad hoc networks with omnidirectional antennas. Experimental results show that an optimal solution of the MEM problem using our MILP model can always be obtained in a timely manner for moderately sized networks, typically with 50 nodes.