A Cluster‐Based Opportunistic Multicast in Multi‐hop Wireless Networks

Abstract

Multicast has become increasingly important in multi-hop wireless networks for such applications which deliver shared media and data to multiple receivers. However, the existing multicast protocols for wireless network have large control overhead, and cannot adequately take the advantage of broadcast communication mode in multicast structure for sharing the forwarding path. This paper proposes a Cluster-based opportunistic multicast (COM) algorithm, which constructs multicast tree structure based on clusters by utilizing a stability greedy algorithm to achieve the minimum total Cluster-based expected transmission count (CETX). In this multicast tree structure, the edge is created between the kernel sets respectively belonging to two clusters for improving the forwarding efficiency and the stability of this structure. In the process of data distribution, our multi-layer solution combines multicast and opportunistic routing to improve the efficiency of transmission. Simulation results show that COM scheme can achieve the less total number of sending packets, and higher stability than other topology-based solutions and opportunistic multicast.