Multicasting along energy-efficient meshes in mobile ad hoc networks

Energy efficiency is an important issue for mobile devices in ad hoc networks since they often have to rely on their batteries. In consideration that current mesh-based multicast routing protocols don´t tend to form energy-efficient multicast infrastructure, we propose a new energy-efficient multicast routing protocol (E²MRP) for mobile ad hoc networks. The two main characteristics of E²MRP are 1) using in turn the criteria for minimum energy consumed per packet and minimum maximum node cost during the course of relaying group (RG) creation and maintenance, and 2) forming a graph-based multicast infrastructure instead of a tree-based one. For comparison, E²MRP is implemented together with multicast incremental power (MIP) protocol and on-demand multicast routing protocol (ODMRP). When over half of nodes join multicast group and nodes move at higher speed, as we observe, MIP results in higher energy consumption for each packet than E²MRP and ODMRP due to the fragile multicast tree. Compared to MIP and ODMRP, E²MRP tremendously reduces the energy consumption rate of nodes and hence prolongs the lifetime of nodes and networks, especially when the size of multicast group is small and node mobility is low. Simulation results demonstrate significant performance improvement.