A novel overlay multicast protocol in mobile ad hoc networks: design and evaluation

Despite significant research in mobile ad hoc networks, multicast still remains a research challenge. Recently, overlay multicast protocols for MANET have been proposed to enhance the packet delivery ratio by reducing the number of reconfigurations caused by nongroup members´ unexpected migration in tree or mesh structure. However, since data is delivered by using replication at each group member, delivery failure on one group member seriously affects all descendent members´ packet delivery ratio. In addition, delivery failure can occur by collision between numbers of unicast packets where group members densely locate. In this paper, we propose a new overlay multicast protocol to enhance packet delivery ratio in two ways. One is to construct a new type of overlay data delivery tree, and the other is to apply a heterogeneous data forwarding scheme depending on the density of group members. While the former aims to minimize influence of delivery failure on one group member, the latter intends to reduce excessive packet collision where group members are densely placed. Our simulation results show distinct scalability improvement of our approach without regard to the number of group members or source nodes.