LSMRP: Link stability based multicast routing protocol in MANETs

In MANETs, there are many critical issues such as energy consumption, QoS, exposure to attacks, link stability etc. that need to be addressed for improved communication. `Link Stability' is important because radio links are likely to be unreliable due to node mobility. This instability leads to increased rerouting which further escalates routing overhead. One way of reducing routing overhead is use of multicasting instead of unicast routing. Multicast Routing Protocol transmits data simultaneously to a group of destination nodes to achieve better resource utilization. In this paper, we present a multicasting routing protocol that uses received signal strength as a metric to estimate link stability. Estimated SINR (Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio) at every node in respect of different senders is used to determine a reliable path that is likely to mitigate link failures and reduce end-to-end delay. For any two nodes, we aim at finding best link with high probability of longer lifetime. We have simulated our experiment on Exata/Cyber Simulator and compared the result of the proposed routing protocol with ODMRP (On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol) based on minimum hop count. Analysis of our simulation results show improvement of various routing performance metrics such as PDR, Routing Overhead and packet drop ratio.