  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.
