MZRP: An Extension of the Zone Routing Protocol for Multicasting in MANETs

In recent years, a variety of unicast and multicast routing protocols for Mobile Ad hoc wireless NETworks (MANETs) have been developed. The Zone Routing Protocol (ZRP) is a hybrid unicast protocol that proactively maintains routing information for a local neighborhood (routing zone), while reactively acquiring routes to destinations beyond the routing zone. In this paper, we extend ZRP for application to multicast routing and call it the Multicast Zone Routing Protocol (MZRP). MZRP is a shared tree multicast routing protocol that proactively maintains the multicast tree membership for nodes’ local routing zones at each node while establishing multicast trees on-demand. It is scalable to a large number of multicast senders and groups. IP tunnel mechanism is used to improve the data packet delivery ratio during transmission. Detailed simulations were performed on the NS-2 simulator. Its performance was also compared with that of ODMRP.