A mobility-based hybrid multicast routing in mobile ad-hoc wireless networks

Abstract

We propose a mobility-based hybrid multicast routing (MHMR) protocol suitable for mobile ad-hoc networks. The main features that our proposed protocol introduces are the following: (a) a mobility based clustering and group based hierarchical structure, in order to support stability and scalability effectively; (b) a group based (limited) mesh structure and forwarding tree concepts, in order to support mesh topology robustness which simultaneously provides "limited" redundancy and efficiency of tree forwarding; (c) a combination of proactive and reactive concepts which provide the low route acquisition delay of proactive techniques and the low overhead of reactive methods. The performance evaluation of the proposed protocol is achieved via modeling and simulation. The corresponding results demonstrate the proposed multicast protocol's efficiency in terms of packet delivery ratio, scalability, control overhead and end-to-end delay as a function of mobility, packet generation rate and multicast group size.