M3RP: Multi-rate/Multi-range Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

According to the property of different modulations, the wireless ad hoc network can be treated as a new type of network named multi-rate/multi-range wireless network (M2WN). By the property of M2WN, this paper proposes a new multicast routing protocol, named as multi-rate/multi-range multicast routing protocol (M3RP), to reduce the end-to-end transfer delay as well as to reduce the network resource consumption. Simulation results show that M3RP can achieve higher packet delivery ratio, lower network resource consumption, and lower average end-to-end transfer delay than the conventional minimum-hops approach with fixed data rate especially in heavy traffic load.