Energy Efficient Multicast Communication in Cognitive Radio Wireless Mesh Network

Multicasting is a basic networking primitive used in a wide variety of applications that is also true for cognitive radio-based networks. Although cognitive radio technology is considered to be the most promising technology to deal with spectrum scarcity, it relates to completely different aspects of networking and presents new challenges. For cognitive radio-based multicast sessions, it is important to use the spectrum efficiently by reducing the number of channels used as well as engaging fewer nodes in data relaying. This will benefit the network in three ways. First, it will decrease the number of transmissions. Second, it will help to reduce energy usage. Third, it will spare more channels and relay nodes for simultaneous multicast sessions. To achieve these advantages, efficient channel selection and relay nodes are required based on hop-to-hop communication. In this paper an algorithm has been developed that attempts to minimize energy consumption by selecting the minimum possible number of relay nodes and channels for a multicast session, taking into account the sporadic availability of the spectrum. The proposed method performs effectively compared to the flooding method in terms of energy consumption for the provided examples in multicasting.