Performance analysis of multicast routing protocols in ad-hoc networks

A MANET is an autonomous collection of mobile users where network topology may change rapidly and unpredictably over time. In case of more number of receivers, multicasting is the appropriate mechanism. For MANETs many multicast protocols have been proposed and prominent among them are On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP), Multicast Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (MAODV), Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM), Multicast Open Shortest Path First (MOSPF) and Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP). In this work, performance metrics for these protocols are first identified and then simulation is performed to analyze their performance in different scenarios varying the multicast group size. QoS metrics identified in this work are multicast throughput, average multicast end to end delay, average multicast jitter, packet delivery ratio, control overhead and link utilization. Qualnet 6.1 simulator has been used to calculate these metrics. The overall results obtained conclude that if all the metrics are considered then ODMRP outperforms the other protocols due to consistent performance. End to end delay, Jitter and Control overhead of MAODV is largest among all. But if only Throughput and Packet delivery ratio is concerned than it is observed that MAODV performs better.