Energy-efficient broadcast and multicast routing in ad hoc wireless networks

This paper considers the problem of broadcasting in large ad hoc wireless networks. We focus on the energy-efficient broadcast routing in stationary networks and consider the case where wireless nodes can dynamically control their transmission power for each broadcast session. The minimum spanning tree (MST) has the property that the longest edge in the tree is the shortest among all the spanning trees, We introduce a new algorithm called minimum longest edge (MLE) that constructs a broadcast tree using MST. This algorithm provides a scheme to balance the energy consumption among all nodes. The simulation results show that MLE improves the energy balance and network lifetime for a wide range of networks, and the improvement is more significant when the network size increases.