MC-OR: Opportunistic routing based mutlicast protocol for wireless networks

Unlike fixed path routing, Opportunistic Routing (OR) in wireless networks can use alternate links/routes which have low success rates but are still occasionally capable of successful transmission. This paper extends standard unicast OR protocols to support multicast transmissions in a wireless network. The proposed multicast OR (MC-OR) protocol generates multiple multicast trees to serve multiple destinations as efficiently as possible. By routing traffic over these multiple trees in a scheduled fashion, MC-OR reduces both the total number of transmissions and the overall transmission time. Results of simulation studies show substantial improvement over standard fixed path multicast routing using MOSPF or multicasting using a Steiner Tree.