Research on Overlay Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In recent years, with the development of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) technology, various overlay multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These protocols have distinguishing features and different applications. To provide a comprehensive understanding of these overlay multicast routing protocols and better organize existing ideas and work to facilitate overlay multicast routing design for MANETs, we simply present some research of these main kinds overlay multicast routing protocols. This paper aims to aid those MANETs researchers and application developers in selecting appropriate overlay multicast routing protocols for their work.