Publication

Abstract : Instead of sending data via multiple unicasts, multicasting reduces the communication costs by minimizing the link bandwidth consumption and delivery delay. This is especially important in the context of mobile, wireless environments where bandwidth is scarce and hosts have limited power. Multicast communication in the context of ad hoc wireless network is a very useful and efficient means of supporting grouporiented applications, where the need for one-to-many data dissemination is quite frequent in critical situations such as disaster recovery or battlefield scenarios. The objective of this paper is to propose and evaluate a demand-driven multicasting routing mechanism for ad hoc wireless network. The mechanism is an extension of our previously proposed stability-based unicast routing scheme that relies on determining link stability and path stability in order to find out a stable route from a source to a destination. The proposed multicast routing mechanism depends only on local state information (at source) for constructing a multicast tree. It is demanddriven in the sense that whenever a source needs to communicate with a set of destinations, it discovers the routes and creates a multicast tree dynamically. It has been shown that the proposed multicast routing scheme reduces both the control traffic and the data traffic and decreases the delivery delay considerably when compared to multiple unicasts