An energy-efficient cooperative multicast routing in multi-hop wireless networks for smart medical applications

With the advance of multimedia and pattern recognition based medical technologies, smart medical applications in smart hospital and smart medical for individual, such as disease diagnosis and health monitoring, play an important role in our life. However, the communication infrastructure of supporting these applications is a challenge. This paper studies the energy-efficient multicast routing problem in multi-hop wireless networks for these medical applications. Energy consumption has become the main problem of sustainable development of communication networks, particularly for these applications. How to carry out high energy-efficient communication is an important research topic for wired and wireless networks to implement green communications. This paper proposes an energy-efficient multicast routing approach to multi-hop wireless networks for smart medical applications. Different from previous methods, we aim at maximizing energy efficiency of networks. To this end, we make use of topology control and sleeping mechanism to obtain the optimal routing strategy with maximum network energy efficiency to construct the network multicast route. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is effective and feasible. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.