The Beaconless Node Velocity-based Stable Path Routing Protocol for Unicasting and Multicasting in Mobile Ad hoc Networks

The high-level contribution of this paper is the development of a beaconless node-velocity-based stable path on-demand unicast routing protocol (NVSP) and its extension for multicasting (NVSP-M) in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). During the propagation of the Route-Request (RREQ) messages, every forwarding node includes its current node velocity information in the RREQs. The bottleneck velocity of a path is the maximum of the velocity of an intermediate node on the path. The destination chooses the path with the smallest bottleneck velocity and sends a Route-Reply (RREP) packet on the chosen path. NVSP-M connects the source to each of the multicast receivers through paths with the smallest bottleneck velocity. The lifetime of NVSP routes is 25-35% and 55-75% more than that of the routes chosen by the minimum-hop based Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol in networks of low and high density respectively. The lifetime of routes chosen by NVSP is 60-70% of the route lifetime incurred by the Flow-Oriented Routing Protocol (FORP), the routing protocol observed to determine the sequence of most stable routes. On the other hand, the end-to-end delay per data packet and the energy consumed per packet incurred by NVSP are significantly lower than that of FORP and are lower or equal to that incurred for DSR. We compare the performance of NVSP-M with that of the Bandwidth Efficient Multicast Routing Protocol (BEMRP). Simulation results illustrate NVSP-M yields multicast trees with longer lifetime and lower hop count per source-receiver path; whereas BEMRP yields the minimum number of links per tree.