Bandwidth-efficient multicast routing protocol for ad-hoc networks

In this paper, we propose and investigate a bandwidth-efficient multicast routing protocol for ad-hoc networks. The proposed protocol achieves low communication overhead, namely, it requires a small number of control packet transmissions for route setup and maintenance. The proposed protocol also achieves high multicast efficiency, namely, it can deliver multicast packets to receivers with a small number of multicast transmissions. To achieve high multicast efficiency with low communication overhead, the proposed protocol employs the following mechanisms: (1) on-demand invocation of the route setup and route maintenance process to avoid periodical control packet transmissions, (2) a new route setup mechanism that allows a newly joining node to find the nearest forwarding node, in order to minimize the number of added forwarding nodes, and (3) a route optimization mechanism that can detect and delete unnecessary forwarding nodes. Our simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves high multicast efficiency with low communication overhead compared with other multicast routing protocols