A cooperative multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

Many multicast routing protocols and algorithms have been proposed to support different group-oriented applications in mobile ad hoc networks. However, the conventional tree-based and mesh-based multicast routing protocols generally suffer from frequent link breakage and high communication overhead, respectively. In this paper, we propose a cooperative multicast routing protocol. COMRoute, that incurs low communication overhead while guaranteeing reliable network connectivity. COMRoute utilizes cross-layer design by physical-layer cooperative transmission, MAC-layer clustering, and network-layer multicast routing. Specifically, the physical-layer multi-node decode-and-forward cooperative transmission provides reliable transmission links. At MAC layer, nodes are classified into clusters. In each cluster, the cluster head, serving as a gateway, is responsible for inter-cluster transmission, while other nodes perform cooperative reception. Based on the clustered architecture, we design an on-demand source-based multicast routing protocol at network layer, which takes diversity into account for route establishment. Moreover, COMRoute implements a mechanism to mitigate the asymmetric cooperative transmission problem. Our simulation results show that COMRoute outperforms the representative multicast routing protocols in terms of traffic overhead, delivery ratio, and energy consumption. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.