Design and Analysis of Spatiotemporal Multicast Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks

Qingfeng Huang
Chenyang Lu
Gruia-Catalin Roman

We propose a new multicast communication paradigm called 
``spatiotemporal multicast'' for supporting applications which 
require spatiotemporal coordination in wireless sensor networks.  
In this paper we focus on a special class of spatiotemporal 
multicast called ``mobicast'' featuring a message delivery zone 
that moves at a constant velocity.  The key 
contributions of this work are: (1) the specification of mobicast 
and its performance metrics, (2) the introduction of four 
different mobicast protocols along with the analysis of their 
performance, (3) the introduction of two topological network 
compactness metrics for facilitating the design and analysis of 
spatiotemporal protocols, and (4) an experimental evaluation of 
compactness properties for random sensor networks and their 
effect on routing protocols.