Why should multicast be used in WSNs

Wireless sensor networks present a great potential in monitoring systems. A vast scope of applications can take advantage of WSNs and, mainly because of their own nature, the aggregation of WSN nodes into groups provides more potential solutions when compared with traditional monitoring systems. This paper introduces the issue of multicast messages and their impact on battery resources of WSNs. It presents a study based on a real implementation to evaluate the energy consumed by each node when a multicast or unicast is used. A study of the multicast impact in the neighbourhood is also presented in this paper.