Multicast Routing Protocols in MANET

Multicast routing is an effective way to establish the group communication when the same message or the same stream of data needs to be sent to multiple receivers. Multicast routing has attracted a lot of attention in group oriented computing due to supporting data transmission from a single source node to multiple destinations concurrently. The advantage of multicast routing lies in its capability of reducing the communication cost and saving the network resources by sending only one copy of the message over the shared link leading to different destinations. Generally speaking, this survey classifies the multicast routing protocols into four categories based on the underlying routing structure: tree-based, mesh-based, hybrid, and stateless multicast routing protocols. This survey summarizes the well-known most recent protocols of each category and compares their objectives, performances, advantages, and disadvantages. This survey study helps us to choose the best multicasting protocol for each network application with respect to the requirements of application.