Centered and robust multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks

In order for a mesh-based routing protocol, in a mobile ad hoc network, to perform well it must achieve a high level of robustness without excessive overhead. We present the centered protocol for unified multicasting through announcements (CPUMA) for mobile ad hoc networks. A distributed core-selection and maintenance algorithm is used to find the source-centric center of a shared-mesh. We leverage data packets to center the core of each multicast group shared mesh instead of using GPS or any pre-assignment of cores to groups (the case of existing protocols). The proposed centering scheme allows reducing data packet overhead and creating forwarding paths toward the nearest mesh member instead of the core to reduce latency. We show, via simulations, that CPUMA outperforms existing multicast protocols in terms of data packet overhead, and latency while maintaining a constant or better packet delivery ratio, at the cost of a small increase in control overhead in a few scenarios.