Multicast Anypath Routing in wireless networks

In wireless networks, packets transmitted from a source can potentially reach a number of nodes, some of which may be subsequently used as forwarders for delivering the packets to their final destinations with fewer overall transmissions. For unicast transmissions, this has been exploited in Opportunistic Routing (OR) protocols by assigning to each transmitting node a set of relays to use for forwarding packets where the best relay which actually gets the packet is identified as the forwarder for the next transmission. The earlier reported Least Cost Anypath Routing (LCAR) formalizes this approach by developing least cost anypath routing metrics to decide the optimum set of forwarders and a minimum cost metric to use in such cases. In this paper, we generalize the LCAR approach for multicasting applications and develop multicast cost metrics which can be used to reduce the overall packet transmissions in the network as compared to unicasting approaches.