Lightweight Unicast and Multicast Routing for MANETs

All prominent unicast and multicast routing protocols designed for wireless Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs) require a communications cost that scales like O(N-2) where N is the number of nodes in the routing domain. We explore the use of extremely lightweight network structures, which require communications costs that scale like O(N) or O(N-3/2), for use in new unicast and multicast routing. Our previous studies investigate the efficiency of single or multiple spanning trees for use in discovering unicast routing paths. In this paper we extend our previous studies to investigate the use of these same network structures to build efficient estimates of the Minimum Connected Dominating Set (MCDS) of nodes for multicast packet distribution. We use simulation studies to evaluate the closeness of our approach compared to other prominent MCDS estimate algorithms. We find that our approach results in MCDS estimates as good as the best distributed local algorithms, while generating no additional communications cost over our existing unicast routing methods.