Delay Guaranteed Bandwidth-Efficient Multicast Routing in Wireless Multi-hop Networks

Static wireless multi-hop networks, such as wireless mesh networks and wireless sensor networks have proliferated in recent years because of they are easy to deploy and have low installation cost. Two key measures are used to evaluate the performance of a multicast tree algorithm or protocolend-to-end delay and the number of transmissions. End-to-end delay is the most important measure in terms of QoS because it affects the total throughput in wireless networks. Delay is similar to the hop count or path length from the source to each destination and is directly related to packet success ratio. In wireless networks, each node uses the air medium to transmit data, and thus, bandwidth consumption is related to the number of transmission nodes. A network has many transmitting nodes, which will cause many collisions and queues because of congestion. In this paper, we optimize two metrics through a guaranteed delay scheme. We provide an integer linear programming formulation to minimize the number of transmissions with a guaranteed hop count and preprocessing to solve the aforementioned problem. We extend this scheme not only with the guaranteed minimum hop count, but also with one or more guaranteed delay bounds to compromise two key metrics. We also provide an explanation of the proposed heuristic algorithm and show its performance and results.