Effectiveness of overlay multicasting in mobile ad-hoc network

This paper investigates the effectiveness of the application level multicasting, named overlay multicasting, with respect to the network layer one in mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). With respect to the network layer multicasting in overlay multicasting, only the mobile nodes participating in the multicast group have exploited the multicast routing at the application level while the other nodes of the MANET simply perform unicast IP routing. This constraint in the possibility of using multicast routing in all the nodes that leads to a loss of efficiency in the bandwidth usage are discussed in this paper. The parameter used for comparison is the multicast distribution tree cost, which is built by means of Steiner based algorithms. We measure this parameter by means of an exhaustive simulation campaign by analysing the performance dependence versus the different parameters: device coverage range, number of MANET nodes, multicast group size and mobility model.