A Tree Partition-Based Overlay Multicast in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Nodes mobility brings flinty challenges to multicast in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). To track nodes mobility, flooding messages are widely used for data delivery structure construction and maintenance in many multicast protocols. These periodic flooding messages significantly increase network control overhead. To release data delivery structure maintenance onus, a number of stateless multicast protocols have been proposed, where a destination list is encapsulated into each data packet for data packet orientation. However, due to data packet length limitation, this destination encapsulation-oriented strategy restricts protocol scalability. In this paper, we propose a multicast protocol named scalable location-aided overlay multicast (SLAOM) for MANETs. There is no periodic flooding message for data delivery structure construction and maintenance and no destination list encapsulated in each data packet. Thus SLAOM can significantly reduce overhead.