A Reliable Multicast Routing Protocol Based on Recovery Points and FEC in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Multicasting is an essential service for mobile ad-hoc networks. A major challenge for multicasting in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) is the unstable forwarding path. This work presents a reliable multicasting protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks. A virtual backbone is used as a shared structure for multiple sessions. A lost packet recovery scheme is developed for reliable packet transmission, called the Recovery Point (RP) scheme. The RP scheme maintains the data packets received from the source for recovering lost packets for its downstream RPs. In addition, we combine the Forward Error Correction (FEC) technology with our RP scheme to enhance the reliability of our RP scheme. A mergence scheme for RP is also proposed to avoid excessive control overhead. Our RP and FEC based scheme can be used to improve the reliability and efficiency of the traditional non-acknowledged multicasting approach. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed multicasting scheme. The results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio and multicast efficiency. Furthermore, the simulation results also demonstrate that our approach is stable in networks with high mobility.