A reliable multicast routing scheme for wireless ad-hoc networks

In the wireless ad-hoc network environments, packet retransmissions and path reconstructions are more frequent than in the wired network environments because of the higher probability of transmission failures. Therefore, it is expected that the communication delay will be increased when we apply the hop counts and the delay as the path construction metric to the wireless ad-hoc network environments. In this paper, we propose a scheme that uses link soundness as a path construction metric, and show that the scheme reduces the communication delay when applied to multicasting in the wireless ad-hoc environments. Our scheme also introduces the technique that an intermediate node in the network takes the role of acknowledgment packet forwarding instead of the recipient node. We expect that our scheme will reduce the packet retransmission delay, which occurs as an overhead when the acknowledgment packet is lost.