A Constraint Formulation for Minimum-Energy Multicast Routing in Wireless Multihop Ad-hoc Networks

Energy conservation is a critical issue in wireless multihop ad-hoc networks, which have nodes powered by batteries only. One major metric for energy conservation is to route a communication session along the routes that require the lowest total energy consumption. To do this, we introduce in this paper a new concept called Virtual Relay. Based on this new concept, we present a constraint formulation for the minimum-energy multicast routing problem in terms of mixed integer linear programming. Experiment results show that in a typical multihop ad-hoc network with 50 nodes, the optimal solutions can always be solved in a timely manner, and it also provides a way to evaluate the realistic performance of different heuristic algorithms.