Energy-efficient multicast routing scheme for wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient multicast routing scheme for wireless sensor networks, named extended multicast routing scheme with pruning and energy balancing (E-MPEB) to disseminate data through layered multicast trees with high efficiency and low power consumption. E-MPEB uses pruning and energy balancing algorithms to save energy and balance load. Especially, it supports multisource multicast and multiple multicast tasks. In multisource multicast, we propose dense tree construction and conjunctive pruning algorithms to minimise total transmission in the network. We increase the number of children having the same parent to improve transmission efficiency and turn more nodes into sleep. In multiple multicast tasks, we propose sharing node avoidance algorithm to separate trees for different multicast tasks. This separation reduces transmission congestion at sharing nodes and balances total energy consumption. Formal validations and simulations evaluate the performance of E-MPEB, which show that E-MPEB has a distinct advantage over others in both reducing and balancing energy consumption. Copyright (C) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.