A multicast routing protocol with controllable QoS constraints in clustering Ad Hoc networks

To satisfy the user requirements for continuous and real-time multimedia information, the concept of quality of service (QoS) has emerged as a main issue in mobile ad-hoc networks. QoS routing is to find a route according to the QoS requirements of the users. The provision of QoS guarantees is of utmost importance for the development of the multicast services. In this paper, we propose an efficient multicast routing protocol (MQCAP) based on clustering with QoS constraints, such as delay, bandwidth and delay jitter. The constraints are controllable to different nodes, while a node joins to the multicast tree. In the proposed MQCAP scheme, each intra cluster node only maintains its cluster´s routing information, and each bridge node maintains not only its cluster information but also the summary information of other clusters. The performance measures of MQCAP are evaluated using simulation. In order to evaluate and validate the performance of MQCAP better, we simulate MQCAP and other related routing protocols using NS2.The studies show that MQCAP can maximize the lifetime of QoS multicast routing for mobile ad hoc networks.