Energy-efficient Multicast in Wired and Wireless Networks: Analysis and Performance Measures

Next Generation Network (NGN) services and applications such as Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) will offer multicast features, but due to high traffic volume and high number of receivers there will be challenges of efficient multicast mechanisms for communication. With the rapid development of applications and networks, there is a need to optimize the transmission energy within a multicast group for efficient traffic in both wired and wireless channels. This paper discusses major algorithms for multicasting and then focuses on the analysis of Multicast Incremental Power (MIP) algorithm and the recently proposed Network coding based (NC) algorithm using energy-efficiency as metric. The performance of these algorithms are evaluated and optimized for energy reduction on communication networks. The results show a reduction in multicast energy as network size increases with decrease in multicast energy as the multicast group size increases for both wired and wireless networks.