Survey Paper on Multicast Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

This paper surveys the various multicast routing protocols proposed for mobile ad-hoc networks. Some of the protocols use tree based approaches for creating multicast routes, some use graphs to construct multicast trees for routing, some protocol use the flooding approach to send multicast packets. This paper makes a detailed analysis and talks about the merits and demerits of various multicast protocols for mobile ad-hoc networks. The paper focuses on the number of control messages used in every protocol, the data structures used to maintain information, the merits of the protocol, the demerits and overhead involved during routing, the bandwidth utilized due to these message overheads. Also this paper studies the advantages and disadvantages of using trees, graphs and flooding for routing.