Multicasting is an important operation in software-defined wireless sensor networks (SDWSNs). In this operation, a group of nodes specified by their unique node identification numbers is supposed to receive the same multicast message at the approximately same time, if possible. These nodes are termed as multicast members or multicast destinations. They need not be physically close to one another to form a group. The present article proposes an energy-efficient scheduler exclusively for multicast operation in the SDWSN environment. Based on the advantages provided by underlying network architecture, a router can efficiently schedule multicast packets belonging to various multicast sessions. This promotes greenery in the network and significantly increases the packet delivery ratio. These claims are supported and justified by the experimental results presented in this paper. As far as the authors know, there is no multicast packet scheduler in the literature of wireless sensor networks or WSN. SDWSN is a more advanced version, and no multicast protocol has yet been proposed for these kinds of networks. Therefore, while designing the present fuzzy scheduler, we kept in mind all standard multicast protocols in the WSN environment.
