Multirate-aware Multicast Routing in MANETs

We propose a rate-adaptive multicast (RAM) routing protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) that is multirate-aware. During the process of path discovery, the quality of wireless links is estimated to suggest optimal transmission rates, which are then used to calculate the total transmission time incurred by the mobile nodes on a path. Among several considered paths from a source to a destination, RAM selects the path with the lowest total transmission time. Simulation results have shown that RAM outperforms single-rate multicast in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet end-to-end delay, and throughput of the multicast group. In this paper, we apply RAM to effectively support video multicast in MANETs