QoS-aware minimum energy multicast tree construction in wireless ad hoc networks

Energy conservation is a critical issue in wireless ad hoc networks since batteries are the only limited-life energy source to power the nodes. One major metric for energy conservation is to route a communication session along the routes which require the lowest total energy consumption. Most recent algorithms for the MEM (Minimum Energy Multicast) problem considered energy efficiency as the ultimate objective in order to increase longevity of such networks. However, the introduction of real-time applications has posed additional challenges. Transmission of video and imaging data requires both energy and QoS-aware routing in order to ensure efficient usage of the networks. In this paper, we only consider "bandwidth" as the QoS in TDMA-based wireless ad hoc networks that use omni-directional antennas and have limited energy resources. We present a constraint formulation model for the QoS-MEM (QoS-aware Minimum Energy Multicast) problem in terms of mixed integer linear programming (MILP), which can be used for an optimal solution of the QoS-MEM problem. Experiment results show that in a typical static ad hoc network with 20 nodes, the optimal solutions can always be solved in a timely manner.