Simulation based comparative study of MAODV, ODMRP and Gossip protocol

Multicasting is intended for group communication, which supports the dissemination of information from a sender to all the receivers in a group. Mobile wireless Ad Hoc networks are infrastructure less and often used to operate under unattended mode, posing problems like scarcity of bandwidth, short lifetime of the nodes due to power constraints, and dynamic topology caused by the mobility of nodes. Multiple multicasting protocols have been proposed for Ad Hoc networks based on different approaches and some performance simulations are made on numbers of routing protocols. In this paper, we are comparing three different protocols ODMRP (On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol), MAODV (Multicast Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector), and Anonymous Gossip (AG) using packet delivery fraction as performance parameter while varying various network parameters such as number of nodes, transmission range and mobility of nodes using the tool GloMoSim. We have also taken average end to end delay as performance metric for analyzing the best protocol for delay sensitive applications. To the best of our knowledge, comparison of these protocols have not yet being done on the parameter chosen by us in the literature. We look at the relative strengths, weaknesses, and applicability of each multicast protocol to diverse situations.