Integrated Multicast and Geocast Routing in MANETs

In this paper we present Geo-PRIME, the first integrated routing protocol for geocast and multicast traffic. Geo-PRIME uses interest-defined signaling which eliminates the distinction between traditional on-demand and proactive routing. Interest-defined signaling is based on the concept of regions of interest which are connected components that are used to confine signaling traffic to those regions of the network where the information is actually needed. In Geo-PRIME, the nodes that belong to a destination, either geocast or multicast, elect a node as core of the destination. Cores are in charge of initiating a distributed algorithm that establishes routing meshes that are used to transport data packets from sources to destinations. In order to reduce the protocol overhead, Geo-PRIME aggregates control information of destinations that are located in the same region of the network. Experimental results based on extensive simulations show that the proposed protocol attains similar or better data delivery, end-to-end delay, and control overhead, than traditional geocast and multicast routing protocols for MANETs such as LBM and ODMRP respectively.