A MANET multicast routing protocol for stable trees based on the inverse of Link Expiration Times

This paper proposes a stability-based multicast routing protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) and it can simultaneously determine long-living multicast trees that also have close to minimum hop count per source-receiver paths. The proposed protocol is referred to as the MILET protocol, and is based on the inverse of the predicted Link Expiration Times (LET) values. The protocol launches an on-demand source-initiated request-reply broadcast tree construction process and the receiver nodes of the multicast group choose the path with the lowest sum of the link weights to join the multicast tree. By including a `1' in the link weight comprising of the inverse of the LET values, MILET manages to form multicast trees with long-living stable source-receiver paths that also have a lower hop count. Ns-2 based simulation analysis illustrates that MILET forms multicast trees that have at least 50% relatively longer lifetime compared to the other well-known multicast tree routing protocols and the hop count per source-receiver path is at most 7% larger than the minimum.