Distributed route repair for increasing reliability and reducing control overhead for multicasting in wireless MANET

The Multicast Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (MAODV) routing protocol is proposed for achieving multicast in a Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) while reducing bandwidth waste and energy power consumption. In MANET, packets transmission through a multicast tree may always have unreliable links caused by node mobility or lack of energy, and thus significantly degrades the performance. MAODV uses a broadcast-type local repair mechanism to find an alternative route to the multicast tree when some breaks happen on the tree. Although the local repair mechanism provides a specified time-to-live (TTL) to limit the repair range and the hop-count to the group leader, a large number of broadcast-type Route Request (RREQ) messages extensively yields control overhead and requires a large amount of power consumption to send control messages. Thus, this paper proposes a unicast-type multihop local repair protocol for multicast MANETs to recover lost links efficiently while achieving several advantages: increasing network reliability, increasing packet delivery rate, minimizing the number of control messages and reducing repair delay. Moreover, the optimal number of hops used in the multihop neighbor table is analyzed mathematically. Numerical results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms other repair approaches in terms of successful repair rate, control message overhead and packet delivery rate.