For stationary wireless ad hoc networks, one of the key challenging issues in routing and multicasting is to conserve as much energy as possible without compromising path efficiency measured as end-to-end delay. In this paper, we address the problem of path efficient and energy aware multicasting in static wireless ad hoc networks. We propose a novel distributed scalable algorithm for finding a virtual multicast backbone (VMB). Based on this VMB, we have further developed a multicasting scheme that jointly improves path efficiency and energy conservation. By exploiting inherent broadcast advantage of wireless communication and employing a more realistic energy consumption model for wireless communication which not only depends on radio propagation losses but also on energy losses in transceiver circuitry, our simulation results show that the proposed VMB-based multicasting scheme outperforms existing prominent tree based energy conserving, path efficient multicasting schemes.
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