Multiratecast in Wireless Fault Tolerant Sensor and Actuator Networks

The authors study the multicast problem in wireless sensor networks, where the source can send data to a fixed number of destinations (actuators) at a different rate (multiratecast). A typical motivation of such communication scheme is to enable fault tolerant monitoring applications where data is reported to more than one actuators using different rates that decrease with the sensors distance, so that if the closest actuator fails, others can take over from it. They propose two multiratecast routing protocols: Maximum Rate Multicast (MRM) and Optimal Rate Cost Multicast (ORCM), which are the first localized position-based protocols specifically designed for this problem.