An Intelligent On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol in Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we present an intelligent on-demand multicast routing protocol (IOD-MRP), which is suited for rapidly changing network environments, such as ad hoc networks. This protocol simplifies and enhances the existing core-assisted mesh protocol (CAMP). The main difference between our protocol and CAMP is that we have eliminated the cores from CAMP. We remove the cores from CAMP and apply an on-demand receiver-initiated procedure to dynamically build routes and maintain multicast group membership. In addition, an intelligent mobility management procedure is used to maintain and optimize the multicast mesh. This procedure monitors multicast traffic and learns about link states of the mesh. As a result, the effect of mobility can be reduced, and the mesh structure can be optimized. With this procedure, control messages due to flooding can be reduced as well. Flooding is an important issue in ad hoc networks, and our protocol is able to reduce flooding messages. We compare the proposed IOD-MRP scheme with CAMP. Simulation results show that IOD-MRP reduces number of control messages by 3 to 13% compared to CAMP and still has slightly lower packet delay and packet loss rate than CAMP.