Generalized Cooperative Multicast in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Cooperative multicast serves as an efficient communication paradigm for supporting multicast-intensive applications in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Available studies on cooperative multicast in MANETs mainly focus on either the full cooperation or the noncooperation, which fail to capture the more general cooperation behaviors among destination nodes. To address this issue, this paper proposes a general cooperative multicast scheme CM(f, g, p, tau) with replication factor f, multicast fanout g, cooperative probability p, and packet lifetime t. With this scheme, a packet from source node will be replicated to at most f distinct relay nodes, which forward the packet to its g destination nodes, and with probability p a destination node helps to forward the packet. Here, the packet has the lifetime of t time slots. The scheme is flexible and general, and it covers the full cooperation (p = 1) and the noncooperation (p = 0) as special cases. AMarkov chain theoretical model is further developed to depict the packet delivery process under the new scheme and help us to conduct analytical study on the corresponding expected packet delivery probability and packet delivery cost. Finally, extensive simulation and numerical results are provided for discussions.