An Analysis Study of Various Multicast Routing Protocols in MANETs

Multicasting in wireless networking is the latest technology that works with groups in the network. Multicast routing plays a vital role in point-to-point or multipoint’s communications. Multicasting gives wireless networks more efficient, reliable and secure communication than unicast routing. There exist a lot of multicast routing protocols, some works with wired networks and some work with wireless; some protocols deal with both wired and wireless networks. In this paper, multicasting protocols that deal with ad-hoc networks are analyzed, describing the process how they work and showing the reasons for developing these protocols. At the same time comparisons are made between the protocols to explain the advantages and limitations.