PIM-MANET: Extension to PIM for multicast routing in MANETs

This paper presents a novel multicast routing protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) that uses distribution trees to efficiently forward multicast traffic. The proposed multicast routing protocol is built as a MANET extension to the popular Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) routing protocol used in wired networks; hence, we call our scheme PIM-MANET. Similar to PIM, PIM-MANET is agnostic of the unicast routing protocol that is used to connect users in the network. PIM-MANET extends PIM to the wireless domain by implementing required features such as Duplicate Packet Detection (DPD) to avoid routing loops, removing extraneous messaging, and using a novel tree creation mechanism to form multicast trees that achieve better performance in presence of asymmetric links. We implement the PIM-MANET protocol as a routing daemon for the Linux environment and show the benefits of our approach over currently used MANET multicast protocols.