Grid Multicast: an Energy-Efficient Multicast Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

It is often necessary for a sink to transmit messages to several nodes that are sparsely distributed in a sensor network. For example, the sink needs to reprogram cluster heads in a tiered sensor network. In this paper, we investigate how to deliver packets to a group of sensors using minimal energy. We propose the grid multicast that builds an energy efficient Steiner tree based on only members´ geographic positions. The grid multicast is specially tailored for sensor networks by three design principles: i) it aims to minimize energy consumption in packet multicast; ii) its stateless design does not require intermediate nodes to keep multicast states; iii) it constructs the energy efficient multicast tree without reliance on the global topology. All these characteristics make the grid multicast a suitable protocol for sensor networks with limited resources. Our performance evaluation shows that the grid multicast outperforms other multicast protocols by consuming much less energy.