A Performance Comparison of Multipath Multicast Routing Protocols for MANET

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are characterized by dynamic topology, limited channel bandwidth and limited power at the nodes. Because of these characteristics, paths connecting to the source nodes with destinations may very unstable and go down at any time, making communication over ad hoc networks difficult. Multicasting is intended for group-oriented computing. Multicast generally needs a tree construction that connects all the members of the multicast group as well as the nodes where data packets are duplicate. In this paper, we compared the multicast multipath routing protocols. The MAODV (Multicast Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector) routing protocol shows a smooth performance in light load ad hoc networks. However, as degraded quickly. Multipath routing allows building and use of multiple paths for routing between source and destination pair. It exploits the resource redundancy and diversity in the underlying network to provide benefits such as fault tolerance, load balancing, bandwidth aggregation, and improvement in QoS metrics such as delay. Multiple Path MAODV (MP-AODV) distributes traffic through two node-disjoint routes to improve network efficiency and balances the network loads. Multiple TreeMAODV (MT-MAODV) routing protocol consists mainly of constructing two disjoint trees. Only when the two links are broken, the source nodes restart to find new routes. So it decreases the number of routing discovery and reduces routing overhead. The MT-MAODV and MP-MAODV preferably ensure the network performance in heavy load ad hoc networks.