A Cluster Based Stable Multicast Routing Protocol in Ad Hoc Network

Most of flooding algorithm of recent Ad Hoc multicast routing protocols are suitable under specific networks conditions. If the condition changes like increasing the number of multicast source nodes and networks nodes or having higher node speed and more traffic loads, they will not work well. To provide multicast routing support for a wide range of operational condition, we propose a new protocol (CBSRP) that integrates the effectiveness of a flooding scheme and the efficiency of a mesh scheme. The protocol constructs a new metric of node stability and selects a stable path with the help of entropy metric to reduce the number of route reconstruction. It selects the nodes which have the most weight and stability to be the cluster headers. In order to decrease control overhead, cluster headers are the only sets of nodes which can rebroadcast the broadcasting message from the multicast source nodes. It also adopts reserve gateway mechanism to eliminate the setup latency of new gateway. Even in high speed and high networks traffic loads conditions the protocol performs well.