WINDMILL: A Scalable Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Multicasting supports various applications that need a high collaboration and require data transmission to numerous destinations concurrently. In environments where nodes are continuously moving, as in mobile Ad-hoc networks, seeking efficient routes from a specific source leading to anticipated destinations became an important issue. In this paper a novel scalable multicast routing procedure for mobile Ad-hoc networks is proposed. Our new protocol, WINDMILL, tries to improve performance by introducing a hierarchal routing algorithm and dealing with the area as zones. Furthermore, WINDMILL tries to demonstrate better scalability, performance and robustness through applying the restricted directional flooding. WINDMILL utilizes the network partitioning to forward the route request and reply packets in an efficient way and avoid forwarding duplicate packets. A qualitative comparison between WINDMILL, multicast Ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (MAODV), on-demand multicast routing protocol (ODMRP) and location aware multicasting protocol (LAMP) protocols is presented in this paper. This comparison has considered the used routing category, main contribution, routing structure and network structure maintenance, request and reply packets sending mechanisms, route activation time, selected routes length, and data packet copies number. Our investigation reveals that WINDMILL will be able to achieve scalability by attaining reduced control overhead and low number of data packets copies even within large networks. Hence, WINDMILL can be a good choice for multicasting in Ad-hoc networks established for example among students on a campus or soldiers in a battlefield, where scalability is a key issue.