DSCM: An Energy-Efficient and Rate-Optimal Multicast Protocol for Multihop Wireless Networks Using Distributed Source Coding

In this paper, we propose a new multicast subgraph construction algorithm and a distributed source coding-based multicast (DSCM) protocol for multihop wireless networks. The DSCM emphasize reliability, rate optimality, and energy efficiency. Both algorithms are based on local knowledge of the network. DSCM uses rateless error correcting codes to provide reliability and rate optimality, and distributed source coding to ensure the energy efficiency. We compared our scheme to energy-efficient methods such as network coding (NC) and multicast incremental power (MIP). Simulation results show DSCM performs close to these algorithms. However unlike the proposed algorithm, NC and MIP assume full knowledge of the network topology and have much higher decoding complexity than DSCM.