Network coding-based energy-efficient multicast routing algorithm for multi-hop wireless networks

• We study energy-efficient multicast communication in multi-hop wireless networks.
• We present energy-efficient network model for multi-hop wireless networks.
• We exploit network coding idea to improve energy efficiency of networks.
• We propose the corresponding algorithm and perform detailed simulation analysis.

Multi-hop multicast routing can provide better communication performance in multi-hop wireless networks. However, existing multi-hop multicast routing hardly take into account energy efficiency of networks. This paper studies the energy-efficient multicast communication aiming at multi-hop wireless networks. Firstly, we analyze energy metric and energy efficiency metric of multi-hop networks. Then the corresponding models are given. Secondly, network coding is used to improve network throughput. Different from previous methods, we here consider that network nodes are satisfied with a certain random distribution. In such a case, it is a challenge to construct the network structure that network coding requires. For the above random network topology, we propose three basic structures of network coding to overcome this problem. Thirdly, we present a flexible energy-efficient multicast routing algorithm for multi-hop wireless networks to extensively exploit the network structure proposed above to maximize network throughput and decrease network energy consumption. Finally, we perform numerical experiments by network simulation. Simulation results indicate that our approach is significantly promising.