Ad hoc wireless multicast with mobility prediction

An ad hoc wireless network is an infrastructureless network composed of mobile hosts. The primary concerns in ad hoc networks are bandwidth limitations and unpredictable topology changes. Thus, efficient utilization of routing packets and immediate recovery of route breaks are critical in routing and multicasting protocols. A multicast scheme, On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP), has been recently proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. ODMRP is a reactive (ondemand) protocol that delivers packets to destinations on a mesh topology using scoped flooding of data. A number of enhancements can be applied to improve the performance of ODMRP. In this paper, we propose a mobility prediction scheme to help select stable routes and to perform rerouting in anticipation of topology changes. We also introduce techniques to improve transmission reliability and eliminate route acquisition latency. The impact of our improvements is evaluated via simulation.