Energy-efficient adaptive geosource multicast routing for wireless sensor networks

We propose an energy-efficient adaptive geosource multicast routing (EAGER) for WSNs. It addresses the energy and scalability issues of previous location based stateless multicast protocols in WSNs. EAGER is a novel stateless multicast protocol that optimizes location-based and source-based multicast approaches in various ways. First, it uses the receiver's geographic location information to save the cost of building a multicast tree. The information can be obtained during the receiver's membership establishment stage without flooding. Second, it reduces packet overhead, and in turn, energy usage by encoding with a small sized node ID instead of potentially large bytes of location information and by dynamically using branch geographic information for common source routing path segments. Third, it decreases computation overhead at each forwarding node by determining the multicast routing paths at a multicast node (or rendezvous point (RP)). Our extensive simulation results validate that EAGER outperforms existing stateless multicast protocols in computation time, packet overhead, and energy consumption while maintaining the advantages of stateless protocols.