Load balanced multicast routing protocol for wireless mobile ad-hoc network

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is an interconnected of mobile nodes without any fixed base station in the network. Due to the high mobility of nodes, the network topology of MANETs changes very fast, making it more difficult during data transmission of data packet from source node to destination node. Because mobile nodes have limited battery power, it is therefore very important to use energy in a MANET efficiently. Due to the dynamic topology and limited resources of mobile nodes, the routing scheme in MANETs presents important challenges. In this study, load balancing multicast routing protocol (LBMRP) for MANETs is proposed. In the proposed scheme, all mobile nodes are randomly classified into three types, group-1, group-2 and group-3. To achieve the load balance, three multicast trees (TREE-1 for group-1, TREE-2 for group-2 and TREE-3 for group-3) are constructed. Simulation results show that the proposed LBMRP scheme outperforms multicast ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing protocol (MAODV), reliability of the multicast ad hoc on demand distance vector (RMAODV) and Parallel multiple nearly-disjoint trees multicast routing (Parallel MNTMR) schemes.