A scalable and reliable multicast routing protocol for ad-hoc wireless networks

Multicasting is an essential service for ad-hoc wireless networks. In a multicasting environment with multiple senders, receivers or meeting members, traditional multicast routing protocols must pay great overhead for multiple multicast sessions. This work presents a scalable and reliable multicasting protocol for ad-hoc wireless networks. A virtual backbone is used as a shared structure for multiple sessions. A clustering scheme is used to reduce the routing path length. A novel scheme is developed to effectively multicast packets using forwarding gates. Furthermore, a lost packet recovery scheme is developed for reliable packet transmission. This scheme can be used to improve the reliability of traditional non-acknowledged multicasting approach. Experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed multicasting scheme and the results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms other schemes in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet delivery time, control overhead, multicast efficiency, and cost effect. Furthermore, our approach is stable for networks with high mobility and the lost packet recovery scheme is cost-effective.