Efficient Scalable Group Communication Using Multicast Routing Protocols

In this paper we propose a new multicast protocol for multihop mobile wireless networks. Instead of forming multicast trees, a group of nodes in charge of forwarding multicast packets is designated according to members’ requests. A location service for ad hoc networks is a distributed algorithm that allows any source node s to know the location of any destination node t, simply by knowing t’s network identifier. A location service has a locality aware lookup algorithm if the cost of locating destination t from source s is proportional to the cost of the minimal cost path between s and t. A location service has a locality aware publish algorithm if the cost of updating the location service due to a node moving from x to y is proportional to the distance between x and y. This paper presents a novel multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc wireless networks. The protocol, termed ODMRP (On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol), is a mesh-based, rather than a conventional tree based, multicast scheme and uses a forwarding group concept. It applies on-demand procedures to dynamically build routes and maintain multicast group membership. ODMRP is well suited for ad hoc wireless networks with mobile hosts where bandwidth is limited, topology changes frequently, and power is constrained. We evaluate ODMRP's scalability and performance via simulation.