Multicast zone routing protocol in mobile ad hoc wireless networks

In the past years, a variety of unicast and multicast routing protocols for mobile ad hoc wireless networks (MANETs) have been developed. Zone routing protocol (ZRP) is one of these unicast routing protocols, which is a hybrid protocol that proactively maintains routing information for a local neighborhood (routing zone), while reactively acquiring routes to destinations beyond the routing zone. In this paper, we adapt ZRP for multicast routing purpose, and call it multicast zone routing protocol (MZRP). MZRP is a shared tree multicast routing protocol, which proactively maintains the multicast tree membership for node's local routing zone at each node while establishes multicast tree on-demand. It is scalable to large number of multicast senders and groups. The use of IP tunnel mechanism during data packets transmission improves the overall performance. The evaluation and comparison with ODMRP are performed on the ns-2 simulator.