A review on multicasting routing protocols for mobile ad-hoc wireless networks

An ad-hoc mobile network is a rambling collection of mobile nodes that are constantly changed and randomly located in such a manner that the nodes are capable of changing their interconnections between them on a continuity basis. In order to process easy communication with in the network, a routing protocol which is unicast or multicast used to discover routes between nodes. The main aim of such an ad-hoc network multicast routing protocols is to provide multicast services in an efficient way by creating and maintaining source based shortest path trees. Spanning all multicast group members route construction should be done with a minimum overhead time and communication complexity. This paper examines multicast routing protocols for ad-hoc networks and check the performance of these protocols based on a given set of parameters. The paper provides an overview of six different routing protocols which includes their characteristics and functionality and provides comparison and discussion of their advantages and disadvantages.