Energy Efficient and Robust Multicast Routing for Large Scale Sensor Networks

In this paper we present RE2MR, an energy efficient and robust multicast routing protocol suitable for large scale real-world WSN deployments. RE2MR, a hybrid multicast protocol, builds on the strengths of existing topology-based, hierarchical and geographic multicast solutions, and addresses their limitations. RE2MR establishes a network topology in which multicast member nodes are connected to the root node via near-optimal multicast routing paths. RE2MR discovers deployment area irregularities (e.g., holes) that affect the optimality of multicast routing and considers them when recomputing the near-optimal solution. RE2MR incurs little computational overhead on forwarding nodes, a negligible communication overhead and ensures reliable multicast packet delivery. We implement RE2MR in Tiny OS and evaluate it extensively using TOSSIM. RE2MR reduces the energy consumption by up to 57% and the end-to-end delay by up to 8%, when compared with state of art solutions.