Experimental Analysis of P2P Shared-Tree Multicast on MANETs: the Case of Scribe

Group-Communication (GC) applications are a promising class for real-world MANETs. To understand their practical viability, we have implemented a fullstack prototype in a real MANET testbed, running an extensive set of experiments on it. In this paper we analyse the performance of a P2P shared-tree multicast protocol to support GC applications. Specifically, we have used Scribe, a popular and efficient solution meant for the legacy Internet. Unfortunately, our results show that such solution is not suitable for MANETs. We identify the Scribe structured multicast approach as the main cause of inefficiency, and discuss why structure-less solutions may be preferable.