A Distributed Min-Max Tree Algorithm for Maximum-Lifetime Multicast in Resource-limited Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

We consider the problem of maximizing the multicast lifetime in multihop wireless networks in which each node is static and has limited energy, bandwidth, memory, and computation capabilities. Unlike most multicast algorithms that use centralized greedy algorithms, our algorithm can construct a global optimal maximum lifetime multicast tree in a distributed manner. It has a low complexity of O(lambda_u ) for both memory and computation requirements at each node u, where lambda_u is the degree of node u. The simulation results have shown that it has an expected linear communication complexity under different network sizes and multicast group sizes. This means that our distributed algorithm is also scalable in terms of communication overhead and it is very useful for large-scale energy and bandwidth constrained multihop wireless networks like sensor networks