Multicast Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

The demand to exchange digital information using wireless communication system is growing fast nowadays. When there are independent mobiles users participating in sharing resources or interacting with each other, like wireless video sharing and interactive games, and no centralized connectivity is used, the application can be treated as the application of Mobile Ad Hoc Network. Two multicast routing protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) were proposed. The multicast routing protocol without Quality-of-Service (QoS) support aimed at improving packet delivery ratio. Data delivery tree was built on top of the mesh structure. The mesh structure was updated when there was no data delivery tree to cover all receivers. The branch of the tree was selected based on the link stability prediction. To do so, Packet Delivery Prediction (PDP) was introduced. Models like battery model and route selection model were used at every node in the system to predict the stability of the node/link and make date delivery decision according to the scheme defined. The multicast routing protocol with QoS support aimed at providing Quality of Service to real-time applications. Bandwidth and delay were the two major considerations for the proposed QoS-enabled protocol. The nodes in the system monitored the bandwidth consumption of itself as well as the neighboring nodes. Real-time traffic flow was admitted or rejected at the source based on the bandwidth availability feedback of the intermediate nodes. For admitted real-time traffic flow, the resource was set aside for a specific period of time, which was designed to take into account the mobility and packet inter-arrival delay requirement. Simulation showed the QoS-disabled as well as QoS-enabled multicast routing protocol can achieve their major design goal. The QoS-enabled routing protocol can admit or reject real-time traffic flow according to available bandwidth at the nodes. Real-time traffic was better served using QoS-enabled multicast routing protocol than using QoS-disabled counterpart.