DMIP3S: distributed algorithms for power-conserving multicasting in static wireless ad hoc networks

In a static wireless ad hoc network, given a distinguished source node, and a subset of nodes called multicast group members, the minimum-energy multicast problem is to assign appropriate power levels to nodes in the network so that all group members are reachable from the source, and the total power usage is as small as possible. Computing effective power assignments and the multicast trees in a distributed manner is a major challenge. We devise two distributed algorithms for this problem. The central idea is called incremental power with potential power saving (IP3S). One algorithm, called DMIP3S (distributed multicast IP3S), is for small multicast groups and the other one, called P-DIP3S (pruning version of distributed IP3S), is for larger groups. Extensive simulations show that our distributed algorithms work even better than most known centralized ones. As far as we know, these are the first distributed algorithms for this problem.