A Combined Multicast Routing Protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) are composed of nodes with high mobility, limited bandwidth and low energy. To save energy and bandwidth, multicast in mobile ad hoc networks is used in group communication such as disaster rescues and military command systems. This paper aims at designing a multicast routing protocol which is tolerant to high mobility and limited energy of nodes, while having certain scalability at the same time. A multicast routing protocol called CMRP (A Combined Multicast Routing Protocol) is proposed, which takes into consideration three factors when selecting the routing path, i.e., the path´s expiration time, the number of non-forwarding nodes, and the path´s Hops. The weight of each component is adjustable in order to meet users´ different requirement. Simulation results show that a combination of these three factors is desired to achieve good performance in terms of data delivery ratio and energy consumption efficiency.