Description:

The minimum-energy multicast tree problem aims to construct a multicast tree rooted at the source node and spanning all the destination nodes such that the sum of transmission power at non-leaf nodes is minimized. However, aggressive power assignment at non-leaf nodes, although conserving more energy, results in multicast trees that suffer from higher hop count and jeopardizes delay-sensitive applications, signifying a clear tradeoff between energy efficiency and delay. This article formulates these issues as a constrained Steiner tree problem, and describes a distributed con- strained Steiner tree algorithm, which jointly conserves energy and bounds delay for multicast routing in ad hoc networks.