RISE: reducing interference and saving energy through multicasting in ad hoc wireless networks

We develop an approach that makes use of directional antennas to improve the performance of multicasting in ad hoc wireless networks. We first assume that multicast trees are known for all the active sessions. The antenna beamwidth at the network nodes is determined in such a way that both the nodes' transmit power and the interference among simultaneous transmissions are reduced, while the signal power at the intended receivers remains unchanged. We propose a model to study the performance improvement that results solely from interference reduction by using directional antennas. The proposed approach is then applied to a simple distributed algorithm for multicast tree construction and the performance is evaluated.