Distributed Multicast Tree Construction in Wireless Sensor Networks

Multicast tree is a key structure for data dissemination from one source to multiple receivers in wireless networks. Minimum length multica modeled as the Steiner tree problem, and is proven to be NP-hard. In this paper, we explore how to efficiently generate minimum length multi wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where only limited knowledge of network topology is available at each node. We design and analyze a simple algorithm, which we call toward source tree (TST), to build multicast trees in WSNs. We show three metrics of TST algorithm, i.e., running and energy efficiency. We prove that its running time is $O(\sqrt {n\log n})$ , the best among all existing solutions to our best knowledge. We prove that TST tree length is in the same order as Steiner tree, which give a theoretical upper bound and use simulations to show the ratio be only 1.114 when nodes are uniformly distributed. We evaluate energy efficiency in terms of message complexity and the number of forwarding prove that they are both order-optimal. We give an efficient way to construct multicast tree in support of transmission of voluminous data.