Location aware one-to-many communication in mobile multi-hop wireless networks

This paper presents a uniform solution for multipoint communication in mobile multi-hop wireless networks, spanning the full range of problems from routing to broadcast. Each node is aware of its own location and through a dissemination mechanism, becomes aware of the location of all other nodes in the network. Thus when a node has a packet to transmit, it is able to locally compute a 'snapshot' of the network topology. A tree that describes the paths to follow to reach the destinations of the multipoint communication is then locally computed on the resulting snapshot. The tree obtained is optimally encoded by its unique Prufer sequence, included in the packet header, and then the paths traversed hop-by-hop as in any source routing technique. All the local computations are efficient, being executed in polynomial time. Our uniform solution to multipoint communication has been simulated in mobile multi-hop wireless networks with up to 60 nodes, showing a success rate over 95% for routing and multicast. Furthermore, compared to flooding, our solution achieves improvements of up to 50% on multicast completion delay.