Location-Based Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Wireless network offers freedom moving around the effective transmission area and the flexibility and easy to use function for Internet application. Many applications of computer network involve multiple users that will rely on the ability of the network to provide multicast services. Thus, multicasting will be concerned as an essential part of Ad Hoc networks. Some of the proposed routing algorithms require maintaining a global network state at each node, the imprecision of global state and the large amount of storage and communication overhead induce poor scalability. In this paper, we propose a distributed cluster-based QoS multicast routing algorithm which only requires maintaining a local state at each node. The location information provided by positioning device is aided in route discovery and route maintenance procedure. Our protocol partitions the network into square clusters. In each cluster, a cluster head and gateways are selected by a cluster head selection algorithm and a gateway selection algorithm respectively. After the construction of cluster heads and gateway nodes, a distributed computation collectively utilizes the local state information to construct multicast tree in a hop-by-hop basis. Simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of our algorithm. As it turns out, our protocol has better performance and lower routing overhead than the non-cluster based algorithm. Key-Words: Mobile ad hoc networks, Multicasting, QoS, GPS, Proactive routing, Reactive routing † Corresponding author.