An Overlay Multicast Mechanism Using Single-hop Clustering and Tree Division for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

The previous tree-based and mesh-based multicasting in mobile ad hoc networks need to be improved two their shortcomings of the mechanisms. One of them is lots of signaling overheads to modify multicast trees due to dynamic topology, and the other is inefficiently exploiting wireless network resources for delicately set paths. For the reason, overlay multicast mechanisms in mobile ad hoc networks are proposed to improve such shortcomings, yet they also result in the other problems, which are network scalability and inefficient transmission among dense multicast members. In this paper, An Overlay Multicast Mechanism Based on Single-hop Clustering and Tree Division (OMCD) in mobile ad hoc networks is proposed to improve all the problems. The OMCD exploits single-hop clusters to manage dense multicast members and to reduce overheads by broadcasting. The clusters are created and delegated by cluster leaders, based on location information. Also, multicast sources in OMCD deliver multicast data to only the leaders through overlay multicast tree (OMT) but not all multicast members. Finally, performance of the proposed OMCD is also evaluated by analysis and simulation in the end of this paper.