Energy-efficient broadcast and multicast routing in multihop ad hoc wireless networks

This paper addresses the problem of broadcasting and multicasting in large scale multihop ad hoc wireless networks. We focus on the energy-efficient broadcast routing in stationary networks and consider the case where wireless nodes can dynamically control their transmission power for each broadcast session. Minimum spanning tree (MST) has the property that the longest edge in the tree is the shortest among all the spanning trees. We introduce a new algorithm called minimum longest edge (MLE) that constructs a broadcast tree based on MST, and for networks where nodes have different energy reserves, we introduce minimum weight incremental arborescence (MWIA) algorithm to compute the broadcast tree. Multicast tree can be obtained by pruning broadcast tree. These algorithms provide a scheme to balance the energy consumption among all nodes. The simulation results show that MLE and MWIA improved the energy balance and network lifetime for a wide range of networks, and the improvement is more significant when the network size grows. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.