ALEX: An arithmetic-based unified unicast and multicast routing for MANETs

Explicit multicasting protocols such as Differential Destination Multicast (DDM) in MANETs have been retaining advantages of traditional approach while eliminating their shortcomings especially for small-group applications. However, they still have some drawbacks especially in the group size limitation. In this work we discussed a new unified unicast and multicast routing scheme called Arithmetic Labeled EXplicit (ALEX) Multicast Routing based on arithmetic encoding of on-tree node keys and recursive unicast for MANETs. Our scheme constructs the multicast tree by decoding the bitmap of its output ports for next hops in the forwarding path using a common Multicast Channel IDentifier (MCID) and a node-specific key, so that multicast packets can be self-routed to multiple receivers without requiring header modification, and intermediate nodes on the multicast mesh will be stateless. In addition to scaling up the multicast group size, our scheme can reduce the processing complexity, control overhead and delivery latency comparing to the existing works. The simulation results indicated that our proposed scheme achieves a remarkable improvement in scalability while simplifying the deployment and management for a large number of medium-size multicast groups in MANETs.