Performance Analysis of Multicast Routing Protocols MAODV, ODMRP and ADMR for MANETs

A Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile terminals that are able to dynamically form a temporary network without any aid from fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. In recent years, MANETs are continuing to attract the attention for their potential use in several fields such as military activities, rescue operations and time-critical applications. A very important and necessary issue for mobile ad hoc networks is to finding the root between source and destination that is a major technical challenge due to the dynamic topology of the network. Routing protocols for MANETs could be differ depending on the application and network architecture. The efficiency of the wireless link can be increased by multicasting through sending single copy of messages to all group members. Multicast transmission is a more effective mechanism when compared to unicasting in supporting group communication applications and hence is an important aspect of future network development. This paper evaluates the performance of three multicast routing protocols for MANETs, notably MAODV, ODMRP and ADMR. Different performance aspects are investigated including, throughput, link delay, transmission and control overhead.