Performance Comparison Study of Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks under Default Flooding and Density and Mobility Aware Energy-Efficient (DMEF) Broadcast Strategies

Recently, we had proposed a novel network density and mobility aware energy-efficient broadcast route discovery strategy (called DMEF) to discover stable routes in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). DMEF works by letting each node to dynamically choose its own broadcast transmission range for the route discovery messages depending on the perceived number of neighbour nodes in its default maximum transmission range and the node’s own mobility values at the time of route discovery. A node surrounded by more neighbours makes itself available to a smaller neighbourhood and vice-versa. Similarly, a slow moving node broadcasts the route discovery message to a majority of its neighbours so that links formed using this node can be more stable. A fast moving node advertises itself only to the neighbours closer to it. The effectiveness of DMEF has been so far tested only for MANET unicast and multi-path routing protocols. In this paper, we study the impact of DMEF on the performance of MANET multicast routing protocols. We investigate the minimum-hop based Multicast Ad hoc Ondemand Distance Vector (MAODV) routing protocol, the minimum-link based Bandwidth-Efficient Multicast Routing Protocol (BEMRP) and our recently proposed non-receiver aware and receiver aware multicast extensions to the Location Prediction Based Routing (NR-MLPBR and R-MLPBR) protocols. Exhaustive simulation studies of these multicast routing protocols with DMEF and the default flooding as the route discovery strategies have been conducted. Performance results for each multicast routing protocol illustrate DMEF to be effective in discovering multicast trees that exist for a longer time with a lower energy consumed per node and without any appreciable increase in the hop count per source-receiver path.