Cluster Mesh Based Multicast Routing in MANET: An Analytical Study

Multicast streams are the most popular traffic pattern in many applications of mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET). However, the mobility of nodes causes frequent changes to the network topology and thus efficient routing of multicast traffic becomes very challenging. The establishment of a core-mesh has been deemed as a very effective solution for these dynamic setups. The core-mesh acts as a backbone in order to avoid frequent route discovery. However maintaining the core-mesh imposes significant overhead that dominates the performance for large networks. This paper advocates a novel methodology that combines network clustering and mesh-based multicast routing. The Cluster-Mesh based Multicast Routing (CMMR) methodology forms a backbone using cluster-heads. This makes the backbone more stable against frequent node mobility and enables scalability by limiting the scope of the core maintenance. The paper mainly captures the performance advantage of CMMR over contemporary node-based core-mesh strategies. A mathematical model is developed to analyze the average performance of one of the contemporary core-mesh routing schemes and an implementation of the CMMR methodology using the same mesh formation algorithm. The numerical results demonstrate the advantage of CMMR.