A novel approach to overlay multicasting schemes for multi-hop ad-hoc networks

Multicast is an efficient transport mechanism for group-based community communications and mobile ad-hoe networks (MANET) is recently regarded as a promising solution for supporting ubiquitous computing as an underlying network technology. However, it is challenging to deploy the multicast mechanism used in a wired network directly into MANET owing to scarce resources in wireless networks and unpredictable changes in network topology. Several multicast mechanisms have been proposed in the literature to overcome these limitations. In MANET, especially, overlay multicasting schemes present several advantages over network-based multicasting schemes. However we have observed a com mon limitation of previously proposed overlay multicasting schemes. They introduce redundant data transmissions that waste network bandwidth and the battery of relay nodes. The observation motivated us to propose an efficient way to create and maintain a "semi-overlay structure" that utilizes a few nonmember nodes selected as branch nodes. The proposed scheme, called "SOMRP (Semi-overlay multicast routing protocol)," has been evaluated by using extensive network simulation in two different scenarios, comparing the performance of SOMRP with two previously proposed schemes. Simulation results show that SOMRP outperforms the two schemes in terms of the packet delivery ratio, transmission cost and end-to-end delay.