A QoS Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Multicast routing is establishing a tree which is rooted from the source node and contains all the multicast destinations. A multicast routing tree with multiple QoS constraints may be the tree in which the delay, delay-jitter, packet-loss and bandwidth should satisfy the pre-specified bounds. This paper presents a hierarchical QoS multicast routing protocol (HQMRP) for mobile ad-hoc networks. It can provide QoS-sensitive routes in a scalable and flexible way, in the network environment with mobility. In the proposed HQMRP scheme, each local node just only needs to maintain local multicast routing information and/or summary information of other clusters (or domains), but does not requires any global ad hoc network states to be maintained. The HQMRP attempts to significantly reduce the overhead of constructing a multicast tree with multiple QoS constraints. The performance measures of HQMRP are evaluated using simulation. Simulation results show that HQMRP is an available approach to multicast routing decision for mobile ad-hoc networks.