A branch and price algorithm for the minimum power multicasting problem in wireless sensor networks

The Minimum Power Multicast Problem arises in wireless sensor networks and consists in assigning a transmission power to each node of a network in such a way that the total power consumption over the network is minimized, while a source node is connected to a set of destination nodes, toward which a message has to be sent periodically. A new mixed integer programming model for the problem, based on paths, is presented. A practical exact algorithm based on column generation and branch and price is derived from this model. A comparison with state-of-the-art exact methods is presented, and it is shown that the new approach compares favorably to other algorithms when the number of destination nodes is moderate. Under this condition, the proposed method is able to solve previously unmanageable instances.