Performance evaluation of energy efficient multicast algorithms for providing longest lifetime in wanets

WANET (Wireless Ad-hoc Network) is expected to be deployed in a wide range of civil and military applications. The communicating nodes in these networks might be distributed randomly and are assumed to have packet-forwarding capability in order to communicate with each other over a shared and limited radio channel. Building such networks usually poses a significant technical challenge because energy supplied by batteries is likely to be a scarce resource, and in some applications energy is entirely non-renewable. We consider the problems of maximizing the network lifetime for multicast communications in a WANET that use omni-directional or directional antennas. Recent research results have shown that they are P and NP problem, respectively. In order to provide a better understanding of the research challenges of the energy-aware multicast routing, this article presents a systematical investigation of current state-of-the-art algorithms and compares their complexities. We have also performed a simulation based analysis to assess their performance under various network configurations.