Beacon-less geographic multicast routing in a real-world wireless sensor network testbed

We study the problem of geographic multicast routing (GMR) in a wireless sensor network. In particular, we are interested in geographic routing solutions with a very limited control overhead and overall bandwidth consumption. Existing GMR protocols require nodes to periodically exchange beacon messages to gather information about the position of their neighbors. These beacons represent a waste of resources, specially in areas of the network with no active communications. Beacons also induce significant problems in real deployments such as interferences and collisions that cause inconsistencies in neighboring tables. In this paper we propose a new beacon-less geographic multicast routing protocol called BRUMA. Unlike previous solutions, BRUMA uses the propagation of data packets to opportunistically select next hops among those that are reachable from the sending node. In addition, we contribute a novel next hop selection function by which candidate next hops schedule their responses based on their progress along each of the branches of the multicast tree. This allows the protocol to overcome most of the issues of beacon-based solutions in real deployments such as collisions, low-quality links, etc. The results of our empirical tests in a real testbed as well as in simulations show that BRUMA achieves a higher packet delivery ratio and a lower overall bandwidth consumption than GMR, which is the protocol performing best among existing geographic multicast solutions.