Cluster-Based Gateway-Aided Multicast Routing Protocol in MANET

MANET is a special wireless network with a great capability in multicasting because of its physical broadcasting feature. There appear several multicast routing protocols which perform well enough in small- scale networks, but the performance of such protocols becomes poorer as the network scale gets larger and the mobility of nodes increases. Based on the analysis of popular multicast protocols for MANET and the study of the features of large-scale ones, this paper proposed a new multicast routing protocol aiming at networks of many nodes: CGMRP, Cluster-based Gateway-aided Multicast Routing Protocol in MANET. In CGMRP, gateways can share some multicast routing task from the cluster heads in order to reduce the risk of single point issue of the leader nodes. CGMRP has been simulated on OPNET Modeler for its overall performance evaluation. Simulation results show that CGMRP is able to work well for the multicast routing in large-scale MANET.