A Message Complexity Oriented Design of Distributed Algorithm for Long-Lived Multicasting in Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider an optimization problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that is to find a multicast tree rooted at the source node and including all the destination nodes such that the lifetime of the tree is maximized. While a recently proposed distributed algorithm for this problem guarantees to obtain optimal solutions, we show that its high message complexity may prevent such contribution from being practically used in resource-constrained WSNs. In this paper, we proposed a new distributed suboptimal algorithm that achieves a good balance on the algorithm-optimality and message complexity. In particular, we prove that it has a linear-message complexity. The tradeoff between algorithm sub-optimality and message complexity is also studied by simulations.