Reliable Multicast Routing Protocol with mobility prediction for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Multicasting is an essential service for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). A major challenge for multicasting in MANETs is to find an efficient and reliable path. Thus, this paper introduces a mobility aware recovery technique for reliable multicast (MRTRM) routing protocol in MANET to enhance the multicast efficiency and lifetime of the network. MRTRM is a tree-based cross-layer protocol, designed by an integrating medium access control (MAC) layer for rate adaption and network layer for multicast routing. The proposed protocol operates in the following phases: 1) Multicast tree construction from the source to destinations; 2) An estimation of Resident Time; 3) The data packet forwarding phase; 4) Route maintenance against node/link failures using fast recovery algorithm. An extensive set of simulations was conducted to evaluate the performance of proposed scheme; the simulation results show that the MRTRM increases the packet delivery ratio by reducing the packet drop rate and latency under various scenarios as compared to immediate group ACK tree (IGA).