Energy-efficient geographic multicast routing for error-prone wireless sensor networks

Most usage scenarios for ad hoe and wireless sensor networks (WSN) require some degree of one-to-many or many-to-many interactions. In particular, for the case of WSN there is a number of scenarios in which a node has to send the same data to multiple destinations. Given that sensor networks have very limited resources, multicasting is a very interesting approach to deliver the same data packet to multiple destinations while reducing the amount of bandwidth and power consumption. Furthermore, recent studies have shown that it is of paramount importance to take into account the error prune nature of the wireless links when designing energy-efficient routing protocols. In this paper, we extend our previously proposed protocol LEMA (Localized Energy-Efficient Multicast Algorithm), to deal with the problems of the error prone WSN. Our simulation results show that for networks with enough density the protocol is able to outperform even well-known centralized heuristics such as Minimum Incremental Power (MIP) and Shortest Path Tree (SPT) based on energy.