Unicast forwarded cluster based multicast protocol for ad hoc networks

Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a dynamically reconfigurable wireless network without any centralized administration or infrastructure. Multicasting is the transmission of datagram's to a group of nodes identified by a single destination address. Multicasting can efficiently support a variety of applications and services. Most of existing multicast routing protocols in MANETs consider only one source in a multicast group and become inefficient when the protocol is extended to multi-source multicasting. In this paper, we propose a unicast forwarded cluster-based multicast routing protocol to provide efficient multicasting in the multi-source environment also. The proposed routing method will not use broadcast method to send control packets or data packets. The source or receiver join control messages are transmitted through the cluster heads throughout the network. Thus, control overhead bytes are reduced. Simulation results shows that the proposed protocol maintains the delivery ratio with minimum normalized routing load and outperforms the exiting protocols.