Integration of scoped flooding and overlay multicast in mobile ad hoc networks

Due to unpredictable topology changes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), frequent tree/mesh reconstructions not only hinder high packet delivery ratio, but also cause a lot of control messages to repair broken links. In order to remove unnecessary reconfigurations resulted from migrations by non group members, overlay multicast schemes for MANET have been recently proposed. However, they may suffer from excessive packet collisions, drastic power consumptions as well as unnecessary resource usage where group members are densely placed since all data packets are transmitted in the form of unicast packet. In this paper, we propose a new data forwarding framework to integrate overlay multicast in sparse area and scoped flooding in dense area. By comparing our protocol with previous protocols, we demonstrated good performance in packet delivery ratio, control overhead, and end-to-end delay. On the contrary, the serious performance degradation is also analyzed where frequent join and leave operations happen.