A multicast routing algorithm using movement prediction for mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, how to achieve the multicast communication is a challenging task due to the fact that the topology may change frequently and communication links may be broken because of users' mobility. To keep network connectivity, control packets are periodically sent within the system, resulting in high system overhead. To reduce the amount of control packets, a multicast routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks is designed in this paper. Utilizing movement prediction to estimate the life time of connections for every node pairs, the algorithm largely reduces the amount of control packets as compared to those using periodical path maintenance. Based on the estimate, a local path search rather than a global one is performed before the breakage of a path to get a backup path. This further lowers the system load. To avoid frequent path breakage, the algorithm chooses the path with the longest life among all possible paths. Using a simulation approach, we investigate the performance of the proposed algorithm through a comparison with an algorithm previously proposed in the literature. Based on the numerical results, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm performs well.