GeoPPRA: An Energy-Efficient Geocasting Protocol in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, a variant of the conventional multicasting called geocasting, or location-based multicasting, is presented. The proposed scheme combines anycasting, restricted broadcasting, and local broadcasting to deliver packets to a group of nodes presented in a specific geographic region called geocast region. Also, the proposed scheme utilizes a pheromone-aided multipath algorithm (PPRA) to perform energy-efficient load balancing that increases the network lifetime. We compare the performance of GeoPPRA with well-known geocasting protocol GAMER via simulation. The simulation results show significant reductions of energy consumption, while maintaining comparable delivery ratio defined as the ratio of successfully delivered data packets to the total data packets sent from the source to one of the geocast group members.