Adaptive demand-driven multicast routing in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

The use of on-demand techniques in routing protocols for multihop wireless ad hoc networks has been shown to have significant advantages in terms of reducing the routing protocol’s overhead and improving its ability to react quickly to topology changes in the network. A number of on-demand multicast routing protocols have been proposed, but each also relies on significant periodic (non-on-demand) behavior within portions of the protocol. This paper presents the design and initial evaluation of the Adaptive Demand-Driven Multicast Routing protocol (ADMR), a new ondemand ad hoc network multicast routing protocol that attempts to reduce as much as possible any non-on-demand components within the protocol. Multicast routing state is dynamically established and maintained only for active groups and only in nodes located between multicast senders and receivers. Each multicast data packet is forwarded along the shortest-delay path with multicast forwarding state, from the sender to the receivers, and receivers dynamically adapt to the sending pattern of senders in order to efficiently balance overhead and maintenance of the multicast routing state as nodes in the network move or as wireless transmission conditions in the network change. We describe the operation of the ADMR protocol and present an initial evaluation of its performance based on detailed simulation in ad hoc networks of 50 mobile nodes. We show that ADMR achieves packet delivery ratios within 1 % of a floodingbased protocol, while incurring half to a quarter of the overhead. 1