Location based multicast routing algorithms for wireless sensor networks

Multicast routing protocols in wireless sensor networks are required for sending the same message to multiple different destination nodes. Since most of the time it is not convenient to identify the sensors in a network by a unique id, using the location information to identify the nodes and sending messages to the target locations seems to be a better approach. In this thesis we propose two different distributed algorithms for multicast routing in wireless sensor networks which make use of location information of sensor nodes. Our first algorithm groups the destination nodes according to their angular positions and sends a message toward each group in order to reduce the number of total branches in multicast tree which also reduces the number of messages transmitted. Our second algorithm calculates an Euclidean minimum spanning tree at the source node by using the positions of the target nodes. According to the calculated MST, multicast message is forwarded to destination nodes. This helps reducing the total energy consumed for delivering the message to all target nodes since it tries to minimize the number of transmissions. We compare these two algorithms with each other and also against another location based multicast routing protocol called PBM according to success ratio in delivery, number of total transmissions, traffic overhead and average end to end delay metrics. The results show that algorithms we propose are more scalable and energy efficient, so they are good candidates to be used for multicasting in wireless sensor networks.