A Comparative Study of Gossip based Multicast Routing Protocols for Wireless Ad Hoc Network

Multicast routing protocols for mobile adhoc networks has the inability to handle high priority traffic, poor response to network congestion, excessive processing of control information, sub optimal error recovery and retransmission procedures. Gossip is well matched to the needs of ad-hoc networks since it is a controlledform of flooding. Messages are propagated through the network without congesting the wireless medium and are independent of topology. Gossip based approach forwards a message with some probability to reduce the overhead of routing protocols. Gossip protocols are characterized by each node probabilistically choosing to exchange information with another node. Gossip has also been considered as a scalable broadcast solution in wireless network and widely used for distributed protocol design. We analyze in this paper the performance comparison of various gossip protocols viz Anonymous gossip and Route driven gossip for wireless adhoc network that exhibit various topological and mobility characteristics.