Bandwidth-Satisfied Multicast by Multiple Trees and Network Coding in Lossy MANETs

Wireless links are inherently lossy due to channel fading or interference. Previously, duplicate packets were transmitted on multiple routes of lossy mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to enhance reliability. In this paper, a multicast routing protocol that constructs multiple multicast trees and employs network coding is proposed for lossy MANETs, where each multicast tree can satisfy a predefined percentage of the bandwidth requirement. The proposed protocol can reduce the total bandwidth consumption while providing bandwidth guarantees to a requested flow and ongoing flows. As a consequence of employing network coding, no redundant packet is generated, and no scheduling algorithm for distributing packets among the multicast trees is needed. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms prior multicast routing protocols in terms of the receiving ratio, the admission ratio, and the total bandwidth consumption.