PatchODMRP: an ad-hoc multicast routing protocol

We propose an ad-hoc multicast routing protocol, referred to as PatchODMRP. PatchODMRP extends the ODMRP (on-demand multicast routing protocol), which is a mesh-based multicast routing protocol proposed for ad-hoc networks. In ODMRP, the nodes that are on the shortest paths between the multicast group members are selected as forwarding group (FG) nodes, and form a forwarding mesh for the multicast group. The ODMRP reconfigures the forwarding mesh periodically to adapt it to the node movements. When the number of sources in the multicast group is small, usually the forwarding mesh is formed sparsely and it can be very vulnerable to mobility. In this case, very frequent mesh reconfigurations are required in ODMRP, resulting in a large control overhead. To deal with this problem in a more efficient way, PatchODMRP deploys a local patching scheme instead of having very frequent mesh reconfigurations. In PatchODMRP, each FG node keeps checking if there is a symptom of mesh separation around itself. When an FG node finds such a symptom, it tries to patch itself to the mesh with local flooding of control messages. Through a course of simulation experiments, the performance of PatchODMRP is compared to the performance of ODMRP. The simulation results show that PatchODMRP improves the data delivery ratio, and reduces the control overheads. It has also been shown that the performance gain is larger when the degree of node mobility is bigger