Performance evaluation of flooding-based and associativity-based ad hoc mobile multicast routing protocols

Multicasting exhibits a very attractive characteristic by efficiently distributing a single stream of data to a large number of recipients. Several multicast routing protocols have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. Issues associated with such a network include dynamics in network topology, limited link bandwidth and limited power life. We present the performance evaluation of two categories of multicast routing algorithms for mobile ad hoc networks, namely: (a) flooding-based, and (b) associativity-based multicast routing. Two multicast routing protocols based on these two classes are simulated in a common network environment. Simulation results obtained reveal the superior characteristics of our proposed associativity-based multicast routing scheme under the scenario of low to moderate mobility. The flooding-based scheme, however, results in very high communication overhead even though it is able to maintain good throughput in a scenario with very high mobility.