Orthogonal Rendezvous Multicast for Mobile Sinks in Wireless Sensor Networks

Current multicast protocols assume prior knowledge of destination locations, leading to excessive message transmissions, especially in sensor networks with mobile sinks. Quorum-based systems, known for efficient information dissemination, have not been explored in the context of multicast. To address this gap, we propose ORM (Orthogonal Rendezvous Multicast), a quorum-based multicast protocol that solves location dissemination and data multicasting as a whole. The protocol utilizes a simple geometric principle to disseminate the information from sinks and sources. By exploiting the footprint of disseminated information, ORM transforms the underlying infrastructure to reveal the hidden multicasting structure. Furthermore, two efficient algorithms are proposed to fetch the optimal efficient multicasting paths based on the built infrastructure. ORM was implemented in the NS-2 simulator. Our detailed simulations demonstrate that ORM achieves significantly enhanced scalability in terms of message overhead and low cost without the burden of complex state maintenance.