Performance Analysis of Heuristic Algorithms for Lifetime-Aware Directional Multicasting in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

WANET (wireless ad-hoc network) is expected to be deployed in a wide range of civil and military applications. The communicating nodes in these networks might be distributed randomly and are assumed to have packet-forwarding capability in order to communicate with each other over a shared and limited radio channel. Building such networks usually poses a significant technical challenge because energy supplied by batteries is likely to be a scarce resource, and in some applications energy is entirely nonrenewable. We consider the problem of maximizing the network lifetime for multicast communications in WANETs that use directional antennas. Recent research results have shown that it is NP problem. In order to provide a better understanding of the research challenges of the energy-aware multicast routing, this paper presents simulation based analysis to assess the performance of a group of state-of-the-art algorithms under various network configurations.