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This paper examines the problem of quality-of-service group communications in a heterogeneous network, which consists of multiple mobile ad hoc networks attached to the backbone Internet. A heuristic multicast algorithm named delay and delay variation multicast algorithm (DDVMA) is proposed. DDVMA is designed for solving the delay- and delay-variation-bounded multicast tree problem, which has been proved to be NP-complete. It can find a multicast tree satisfying the multicast end-to-end delay constraint and minimizing the multicast delay variation. Two concepts, which can help the DDVMA achieve better performance in terms of multicast delay variation than the delay and delay variation constraint algorithm that is known to be the most efficient so far, are proposed, namely, 1) the proprietary second shortest path and 2) the partially proprietary second shortest path. An analysis is given to show the correctness of DDVMA, and simulations are conducted to demonstrate the performance improvement of DDVMA in terms of multicast delay variation. It is also shown that the strategy employed by DDVMA is also applicable to handling the mobility of mobile hosts in a heterogeneous network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy constraints have a significant impact on the design and operation of wireless sensor networks. This paper investigates the base station (BS) selection (or anycast) problem in wireless sensor networks. A wireless sensor network having multiple BSs (data sink nodes) is considered. Each source node must send all its locally generated data to only one of the BSs. To maximize network lifetime, it is essential to optimally match each source node to a particular BS and find an optimal routing solution. A polynomial time heuristic is proposed for optimal BS selection and anycast via a sequential fixing procedure. Through extensive simulation results, it is shown that this algorithm has excellent performance behavior and provides a near-optimal solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A network of sensors can be used to obtain state-based data from the area in which they are deployed. To reduce costs, the data, sent via intermediate sensors to a sink, are often aggregated (or compressed). This compression is done by a subset of the sensors called ‘aggregators.’ Inasmuch as sensors are usually equipped with small and unreplenishable energy reserves, a critical issue is to strategically deploy an appropriate number of aggregators so as to minimize the amount of energy consumed by transporting and aggregating the data. In this paper, the authors first study single-level aggregation and propose an Energy-Efficient Protocol for Aggregator Selection (EPAS) protocol. Then, they generalize it to an aggregation hierarchy and extend EPAS to Hierarchical EPAS. The optimal number of aggregators with generalized compression and power-consumption models was derived, and fully distributed algorithms for aggregator selection were presented. Simulation results show that the algorithms significantly reduce the energy consumption for data collection in wireless sensor networks. Moreover, the algorithms do not rely on particular routing protocols and are thus applicable to a broad spectrum of application environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]