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

Multi-hopmulticast routing can provide better communication performance inmulti-hopwireless 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-efficientmulticast routing algorithm formulti-hopwireless networks to extensively exploit the network structure proposed above tomaximize network throughput anddecrease network energy consumption. Finally, we perform numerical experiments by network simulation. Simulation results indicate that our approach is significantly promising. © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.