A new multicast routing protocol based on Xcast and stable link repair for mobile Ad Hoc networks

In view of the compromise between overhead and performance, this paper proposes a MAODV-X multicast routing protocol by incorporating the excellence of Explicit Multicast with the multicast-tree based routing protocol and stable link repair in Ad Hoc network, which simplifies the MAODV multicast trees by establishing the specific routing table in intermediate nodes in order to reduce the control overhead, predigests the compression code of explicit multicast IP address to lower the complexity of explicit multicast IP header, furthermore, computes the stability coefficient based on maximum entropy in Shannon theorem by taking into account the energy consumption and the congestion level to choose one of the most stable links during the repairing procedure and avoid frequent link repair. The simulation results demonstrate that the MAODV-X protocol performs better in the scenarios of different size of multicast group, different maximum moving speed compared with the counterparts including MAODV and E2M.