A Hybrid Mesh-Explicit Multicast Protocol for MANETs

In this paper, we propose a new Hybrid Mesh-Explicit Multicast Protocol for MANETs, called HMEP. The objective of HMEP is to efficiently support arbitrary number of arbitrary size multicast groups in MANETs. More specifically, it integrates two multicast protocols: ODMRP and an unproved version of EM2NET, called IEM2NET. It has been shown that EM2NET outperforms existing multicast protocols in the case of large number of small size multicast groups while ODMRP outperforms existing protocols in the case of small number of large size multicast groups. The basic idea behind HMEP is to switch, in real-time, between ODMRP and IEM2NET based on the state of the multicast group (group size, mobility speed of the members, multicast traffic); the switch between ODMRP structure (i.e., mesh) and IEM2NET structure (i.e., tree) cause almost no data losses since HMEP uses a make&break approach. Simulations show that HMEP outperforms existing protocols in terms of energy savings and reliability.