A Supporting Efficient and Dynamic Multicasting Over Multiple Regions in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Designing multicast routing protocol is a big challenge due to difficulty in achieving group membership management, packet forwarding and maintenance of multicast structure over the dynamic network topology. In this paper, we proposed a novel Efficient Geographic Multicast Protocol (EGMP). A network wide zone-based bi-directional tree is used to achieve efficient membership management and multicast delivery. In Efficient EGMP an efficient distributed algorithm is used, that support dynamic changes to the multicast group during tree building and allows overlapping join/leave operations. The multicast tree is constructed based on zone depth, which is efficient in guiding tree branch building and tree structure maintenance. Nodes in the network self-organized into zones and zone-based bidirectional-tree-based distribution paths are built. Our simulation results demonstrate that EGMP has high packet delivery ratio, low control overhead and multicast group joining delay under all test scenarios, and is scalable to both group size and network size.