The University of British Columbia

We consider the problem of maximizing the network lifetime for multicast connections in a wireless ad hoc network (WANET) that use omni-directional / directional antennas and have limited energy resources. Unlike most centralized multicast algorithms, we provide a globally optimal solution to this problem in a distributed manner in a WANET with omnidirectional antennas. This graph theoretic approach provides us insights into more general case of using directional antennas, and inspires us to produce a group of distributed algorithms. Simulation results show that our distributed algorithms outperform other centralized multicast algorithms significantly in terms of network lifetime.