A multicast delivery approach with minimum energy consumption for wireless multi-hop networks

Multicast delivery in wireless multi-hop networks has become the popular research topic and holds the important applications such as sensor and tactical networks. However, how to minimize multicast energy consumption and prolong the lifetime of multicast connection in wireless multi-hop networks with limited energy is a challenge at present. This paper presents a new approach to solve this problem by considering the cognitive ability of nodes. Above all, we exploit the directional reception antennas to propose a directional reception two-step reconstruction routing scheme to set up multicast tree for wireless multi-hop networks. Different from previous methods, we grant the cognitive ability to each node so that they can obtain the minimum transmission power by sensing, learning, acting, and deciding. We propose two algorithms to find the minimum transmission power of all the nodes in the multicast tree built above. And a global optimal multicast delivery algorithm with the minimum energy consumption is proposed to implement effective multicast communication for wireless multi-hop networks with energy limited. Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the multicast performance of wireless multi-hop networks with energy limited such as the lifetime of multicast connection and transmission power.