Multicast Routing Algorithms For Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Recently wireless Ad Hoc networks (WANETs) have been paid a lot of attentions in society. WANET is an autonomous system of mobile or static hosts (also as routers) connected by wireless links, the union of which forms a communication network model in the form of arbitrary communication graph. In cellular networks, communications between two nodes completely rely on the wired backbone and fixed base stations. Unlike wire-line networks, WANETs have no such base stations. Resource in WANET is seriously limited, such as bandwidth constraints and energy constraints etc. This presents a serious challenge to design routing strategies for WANET. WANET was initially applied to battery field because of its ease of deployment. Currently it has been used in our daily life, such as virtual classroom and online gaming etc. In these applications, it is not suitable to use point-to-point communication model because of it's over cost. In this regard, multicasting can improve the performance of WANET significantly. We analyze and compare a number of existed multicasting routing protocols for WANET, and develop some protocols. The existed protocols are classified to four types: tree-based multicast protocols, meshed based multicast protocols, stateless multicast protocols and hybrid protocols. We propose two new algorithms to improve the performance of WANETs. Theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms are able to obtain better performance than those existed protocols.