Group Steiner Tree Model for Energy Efficient Multicast in Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks

We focus on the minimum-energy multicasting (MEM) problem in Duty-Cycle Wireless Sensor Networks (DC-WSN) and propose two improved algorithms to solve it. We first formulate the MEM problem as a Group Steiner Tree (GST) model, which can be solved by a series of well-known approximate algorithms. We adopt one of best known GST approximate approaches to directly solve this problem but it still takes a long computation time. We then follow the extended graph based approach and propose an improved algorithm called R-TCS. By using an enhanced scheme during the construction of multicast tree, our proposed R-TCS algorithm can find a much better solution in terms of energy cost. Simulation results show that the R-TCS significantly outperforms TCS and can be compared with GS-MEM in terms of total transmission energy cost while only requiring a reasonable extra computation time.