An efficient multicast routing protocol with a minimum Routing load on the Network

MANETs (Mobile Ad hoc Networks) are the wireless networks which are efficiently handling a number of freely moving nodes without any fixated administration. The intermediate nodes here act themselves as routers. Communication between nodes or devices in these networks is achieved in a multi-hop fashion. Due to rapid movement of nodes topological changes occur frequently thus requires a protocol for routing. Currently researchers are showing their interest in developing the routing protocols that adopts communication standards like multicast, flouting the conventional unicast and broadcast type communications. An efficient multicast protocol tries to deliver data to all the target recipients through a minimum load on the network. SLIM+ (Advanced-Simple Lightweight Intuitive Multicast) [1-4] is a routing protocol that uses tree based distribution structure to avoid redundancy and competes amongst the representative multicast routing protocols for MANETs. SLIM+ possesses an additional feature of advertisement that qualifies it to transmit data for open groups (open for the every node comes in the antenna range). In this paper we are evaluating SLIM+'s performance with and without advertisement feature so that it would be compared with the most widely used mesh based protocol PUMA which does not supports data transmission for open groups. After various simulations on NS2 it is observed that when SLIM+ is compared with PUMA multicast routing protocol in high mobility scenarios, it is found outdoing with respect to the routing load.