A Reliable Multicast Routing Protocol Based on Recovery Points in Mobile Ad-HOC Networks

Multicasting is an essential service for mobile ad-hoc networks. A major challenge of multicasting in mobile ad-hoc networks is unstable forwarding path. This work presents a reliable multicasting protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks. A virtual backbone is used as a shared structure for multiple sessions, and a lost packet recovery scheme is developed for reliable packet transmission, called recovery point (RP) scheme. The RP scheme keeps the data packets from the source for recovering lost packets for its downstream RPs. A mergence scheme for RP is proposed to avoid the excessive control overhead. This scheme can be used to improve reliability of the traditional non-acknowledged multicasting approach. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed multicasting scheme and the results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio and multicast efficiency. Furthermore, the simulation results also demonstrate that our approach is stable in networks with high mobility