A cluster based multi-source multicast routing protocol using genetic algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks

Ad hoc networks are wireless, infrastructureless, multi-hop and dynamic networks, established by a collection of mobile nodes which provide envisioned applications and features to the modern communication technologies and services. Multicast is a type of routing scheme, which transmit datagram's to a set of desirable destinations identified by a single address which can efficiently support a variety of applications and services. Most of existing multicast routing protocols in MANETs consider only one source in a multicast group and become extended to multi-source multicasting. In this paper, we proposed a cluster-based multicast routing protocol with the use of genetic algorithm to provide efficient multicasting for ad hoc networks in multicast environment. The simulation composed with 200 mobile nodes with both single active multicast cluster and multiple active multicast clusters. This proposed cluster-based routing preserve forwarding efficiency as well as robustness due to this cluster structure and maintenance. Moreover, to prove the proposed approach performance which has compared with ODMRP routing protocol for delivery ratio, control overhead and forwarding efficiency in the different multicast effects such as increasing number of sources and receivers in the network.