A link stability-based multicast routing protocol for wireless mobile ad hoc networks

Recently, several studies have been conducted to design mobility-based multicast routing protocols for wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). These protocols assume that the mobility parameters of the network are fixed, and so they cannot perform well under real MANET scenarios in which the mobility parameters of the hosts vary over time at random. Finding the optimal solution to the multicast routing problem is incredibly hard, if the mobility parameters are assumed to be random variables. This becomes more difficult when the probability distribution function of these random variables is assumed to be unknown. In this paper, we propose a weighted multicast routing algorithm for MANET in which the mobility parameters are supposed to be random variables with unknown distribution. In this method, the multicast routing problem is first transformed into an equivalent stochastic Steiner tree problem in which the random weight associated with a communication link is its expected duration time. Then, a learning automata-based algorithm is proposed for solving the proxy Steiner tree problem. The aim of the proposed algorithm is to find the most stable multicast route (with the maximum duration) against the host mobility. Experimental results confirm the superiority of the proposed method over the best existing mobility-based multicast routing protocols in terms of the packet delivery ratio, multicast route lifetime, control message overhead, and end-to-end delay. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.