An Implicit Cluster-Based Overlay Multicast Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A characteristic of mobile ad hoc networks, mobility leads to frequently update multicast routing information based on network multicasting. For the reason, comparatively lots of control signaling messages are generated, so bandwidth of wireless media and limited battery power of mobile nodes are inefficiently consumed. To improve the shortcomings, overlay multicast protocols on application layer has been proposed; however, some of them have another shortcoming which is that the number of unnecessary data forwarding among multicast members increases. Additionally, they hardly support network scalability. Thus, this paper proposes an implicit cluster-based overlay multicast protocol exploiting tree division (ICOM-TD) for mobile ad hoc networks to improve their shortcomings. Finally, we evaluate performance of ICOM-TD through numerical analysis about complexity of multicast routing and simulation in comparison with existing multicast mechanisms for ad hoc networks on end-to-end time delay, packet overhead, and delivery ratio.