EM2NET: An Energy-Saving Explicit Multicast Protocol for MANETs

In this paper, we propose a new explicit multicast protocol for MANET, called EM2NET. The objective of EM2NET is to efficiently support large number of small multicast groups in MANETs. EM2NET strikes a nice balance between the characteristics of explicit multicast protocols (e.g., Xcast and E2M) and these of tree/mesh-based multicast protocols (e.g., ODMRP and MAODV). Indeed, it combines the encoding of destinations addresses in the packet header and the maintenance of multicast state information in carefully selected nodes. Simulations show that EM2NET outperforms (a) explicit multicast protocols and (b) tree/mesh based protocols in the case of small size multicast groups.