Scalable Team Oriented Reliable Multicast routing protocol for tactical mobile ad hoc networks

This paper presents the scalable team oriented reliable multicast (STORM) routing protocol, designed to provide reliability in a tactical mobile ad hoc network (MANET) under a wide range of scenarios and network conditions. STORM organizes individual nodes with similar mobility patterns and speeds into teams, and builds a hierarchy-based multicast mesh structure among elected team nodes. A unicast acknowledgement scheme (UAS) is developed to build the routing structure in an efficient manner. To improve the reliability of STORM, a modified version of reliable adaptive congestion controlled multicast (ReACT) is used as a reliable transport protocol. The simulated performance results indicate that STORM is scalable with respect to number of multicast groups, multicast sources, and network load. Furthermore, the adoption of ReACT as a transport protocol improves the performance of STORM in conditions of heavy network traffic.