Interoperability of multicast routing protocols in wireless ad hoc networks

Although MANETs have typically been considered as isolated, stand-alone networks with no connection to the Internet, it is quite likely that future internetworks may interconnect numerous MANET clouds, each running different routing mechanisms. This could be primarily dictated by administrative constraints or different network functional and performance requirements and can result in scenarios where nodes belonging to different MANET clouds running different routing mechanisms may wish to communicate with one another. In this paper we introduce techniques to allow interoperability of various multicast routing protocols in MANETs. In particular we investigate two different interoperability techniques i.e flooding based interoperability and facilitator assisted interoperability. Our preliminary evaluation of the two techniques indicates that the flooding based mechanism is best suited for scenarios involving intermittent communications between different ad-hoc domains whereas the facilitator assisted approach is best suited for data intensive applications such as video-conferencing.