Tree-based multicast protocol using multi-point relays for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is expected to become useful and important for some applications in the next generation wireless communication systems. An efficient routing protocol for a MANET is required to consider the mobility of nodes and the characteristics of wireless channel. To multicast data to a specific group in a network, an efficient routing path from a source node to the specific group has to be determined. Moreover, the property of the link-layer should be taken into consideration because the network performance is highly dependent on a MAC protocol as well as a routing mechanism. By a cross-layer design approach, we propose a novel tree-based multicast protocol using multi-point relays (MPRs) for MANETs. In our protocol, a routing path by a source-rooted tree consisting of MPRs in a network is determined. And we propose a data forwarding mechanism by a unicast and overhearing to reduce the effect of collisions by hidden nodes in the contention based MAC protocol. We show that our proposed multicast protocol is appropriate for multimedia data transmission via simulations.