Bandwidth-efficient multicast routing for multihop, ad-hoc wireless networks

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and investigate a bandwidth-efficient multicast routing protocol for ad-hoc networks. The proposed protocol achieves low communication overhead, namely, it requires a small number of control packet transmissions for route setup and maintenance. The proposed protocol also achieves high multicast efficiency, namely, it delivers multicast packets to receivers with a small number of transmissions. In order to achieve low communication overhead and high multicast efficiency, the proposed protocol employs the following mechanisms: (1) on-demand invocation of the route setup and route recovery processes to avoid periodic transmissions of control packets, (2) a new route setup process that allows a newly joining node to find the nearest forwarding node to minimize the number of forwarding nodes, and (3) a route optimization process that detects and removes unnecessary forwarding nodes to eliminate redundant and inefficient routes. Our simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves high multicast efficiency with low communication overhead compared with other existing multicast routing protocols, especially in the ease where the number of receivers in a multicast group is large.