Congestion controlled adaptive lightweight multicast in wireless mobile ad hoc networks

The use of contention-based MAC protocols combined with hidden terminal problems make multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks much more sensitive to load and congestion than wired networks or even wireless cellular networks. In such an environment, we argue that multicast reliability cannot be achieved solely by retransmission of lost packets as is typically done in wired networks with protocols such as SRM. We contend that in order to achieve reliable multicast delivery in such networks, besides reliability mechanisms, we must also consider jointly two components: reliability and congestion control. In this paper, we propose CALM, a congestion controlled, adaptive, lightweight multicast transport protocol and show that congestion control alone can significantly improve reliable packet delivery in ad hoc networks when compared to traditional "wired" reliable multicast protocols.