Mobility-aware multicast over mobile ad hoc networks

Due to the high mobility of nodes and highly dynamic topology, performing efficient and robust multicast in a Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a challenging task. Most of existing multicast protocols in MANETs discover the routing path by flooding message over the whole network, which result in considerable cost for routing discovery and maintenance. Moreover, the reliability of the discovered path can not be guaranteed, since the stabilities of nodes along such path are unpredictable. This paper presents the Reliable Backbone based Multicast Routing (RBMR) protocol for MANETs. RBMR employs a mobility prediction based election process to construct a reliable backbone structure performing packet transmission, message flooding, routing discovery and maintenance. Other existing multicast protocols for MANETs can also take great advantage of RBMR to alleviate the influence of nodes mobility and perform efficient data transmission. Simulation results show that such protocol achieves good performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, forwarding efficiency and normalized overhead even in the high speed scenario.