A Fault-Tolerant Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad–Hoc Networks

Abstract

In this work, we propose an efficient multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. To achieve high efficiency with low channel and storage overhead, the proposed protocol employs the following mechanism: (1) on-demand invocation of route setup and route maintenance process to avoid periodical control packet transmissions, thus reducing channel overhead, (2) creation of “forwarding group” to forward multicast packets, thus reducing storage overhead, (3) exploration of multiple possible routes from a single flooded query to reduce the frequency of route discovery, thus further reducing channel overhead, (4) a new route setup mechanism that allows a newly joining node to find the nearest forwarding node to minimize the number of added forwarding nodes, thus further reducing storage overhead. To provide the capability of fault tolerance, we introduce the alternate route together with the primary route. We observe that for multicasting the channel and storage overheads of the presented approach are less than those of the DVMRP approach. Also, the channel overhead is less than that in the FGMP approach for multicasting in low mobility scenario, while the storage overheads are the same in the presented approach and in the FGMP approach.