GEographic Multicast (GEM) for Dense Wireless Networks: Protocol Design and Performance Analysis

Multicast is necessary in several wireless multihop communication scenarios. Accordingly, it has received a lot of attention in the past, and several multicast protocols have been proposed. Nevertheless, traditional solutions typically incur poor efficiency when there is a large number of nodes, topology changes occur frequently, and/or the traffic load is low. Geographic multicast has been recently exploited to solve the problems mentioned above. However, these solutions require exchange of topology information that, again, can lead to excessive overhead. In this paper, we propose a new geographic multicast protocol denoted as GEM, which is inspired by the Euclidean Steiner Tree (EST) theory and does not require any information exchange for routing purposes. Therefore, it is very efficient and scalable in wireless networking scenarios where other schemes achieve low performance, especially in terms of energy consumption. In this paper, we also derive some key properties of GEM that allow us to characterize the protocol performance. As a major contribution, we show that these properties are quite general and apply to a wide range of algorithms inspired by the EST. Simulation results assess the derived properties and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed GEM scheme.