Routing and Multicast in Multihop, Mobile Wireless Networks

In this paper we present a multicast protocol which builds upon a cluster based wireless network infrastructure. First, we introduce the network infrastructure which includes several innovative features such as: minimum change cluster formation; dynamic priority token access protocol, and; distributed hierarchical routing. Then, for this infrastructure we propose a multicast protocol which is inspired by the Core Based Tree approach developed for the internet. We show that the multicast protocol is robust to mobility, has low bandwidth overhead and latency, scales well with membership group size, and can be generalized to other wireless infrastructure.