Exploring mesh and tree-based multicast. Routing protocols for MANETs

Recently, it became apparent that group-oriented services are one of the primary application classes targeted by MANETs. As a result, several MANET-specific multicast routing protocols have been proposed. Although these protocols perform well under specific mobility scenarios, traffic loads, and network conditions, no single protocol has been shown to be optimal in all scenarios. The goal of this paper is to characterize the performance of multicast protocols over a wide range of MANET scenarios. To this end, we evaluate the performance of mesh and tree-based multicast routing schemes relative to flooding and recommend protocols most suitable for specific MANET scenarios. Based on the analysis and simulation results, we also propose two variations of flooding, scoped flooding and hyper flooding, as a means to reduce overhead and increase reliability, respectively. Another contribution of the paper is a simulation-based comparative study of the proposed flooding variations against plain flooding, mesh, and tree-based MANET routing. In our simulations, in addition to "synthetic" scenarios, we also used more realistic MANET settings, such as conferencing and emergency response.