k-Span: A k-Redundant Multicast Algorithm in Mobile Wireless Ad Hoc Network

In ubiquitous wireless environment, mobile devices need a more resilient and convenient network communication software. Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) routing protocols are favored in ubiquitous environments due to its self-organization and self-reconstruction characteristics. Routing protocols however, especially the MANET routing protocols, are suffering from the unexpected topology changes and unreliable wireless links. In order to achieve a robust connectivity and steady routing topology, redundancy is usually applied in MANET routing protocols. As multi-path routing without limiting may consume too munch bandwidth and deteriorate network performance, a K-redundant routing algorithm is proposed, where K is an upper bound of connectivity between nodes. In this work, we propose a multi-cast algorithm on K-redundant topology in MANET routing paradigm. We first prove that the optimum multicasting problem is NP-complete. To cope with this hardness, we propose a heuristic algorithm name "k-span" is proposed in this study. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm can effectively build multi-cast tree for k-redundant network.