A Constraint Formulation for Minimum-Energy Multicast Routing in Wireless Multihop Ad-hoc Networks

Energy conservation is a critical issue in wireless multihop ad-hoc networks, which have nodes powered by batteries only. One major metric for energy conservation is to route a communication session along the routes that require the lowest total energy consumption. To do this, we introduce in this paper a new concept called Virtual Relay. Based on this new concept, we present a constraint formulation for the minimum-energy multicast routing problem in terms of mixed integer linear programming. Experiment results show that in a typical multihop ad-hoc network with 50 nodes, the optimal solutions can always be solved in a timely manner, and it also provides a way to evaluate the realistic performance of different heuristic algorithms. Song Guo received the B.S. degree in computer science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 1995 and the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China, in 1998. Since 2001 he has been a Ph.D. student in the School of Information Technology and Engineering at University of Ottawa, Canada. His main research interests lie in mobile ad-hoc routing protocols and algorithms, power-aware design and optimization for ad-hoc wireless networks, and performance evaluation. Oliver Yang is a Professor in the School of Information Technology and Engineering at University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Yang received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ont., Canada in 1988. He has worked for Northern Telecom Canada Ltd. and has done various consulting. His research interests are in modeling, analysis and performance evaluation of computer communication networks, their protocols, services and interconnection architectures. The CCNR Lab under his leadership has been working on various projects in the traffic control, traffic characterization, switch architecture and traffic engineering issues in both wireless and photonic networks. This has been reported in more than 200 technical papers. Dr. Yang is also interested in queuing theory, simulations, computational algorithms and their applications such as reliability and traffic analysis. Dr. Yang is currently the editor of IEEE Communication Magazine.