PAT: A Path-Aggregation-Tree Multicast Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) make pos-sible many new applications in a wide range of application domains. Many of these applications are based on a many-to-many communication paradigm in which multi-ple sensor nodes send their sensed data to multiple sinks. To support these many-to-many applications, this paper proposes an energy-efficient transport protocol in which each source sensor evaluates the multicast costs of various potential multicast trees between it and the destination sinks and then selects the tree with the minimum commu-nication overhead. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed multicast routing algorithm yields a significant reduction in the total energy consumption, and therefore enables a notable improvement in the network lifetime.