Bani Salameh, Jamal & Al-Zoubi, H.Q. & Al-Sbou, Y.A.. (2012).

A novel multicast routing protocol for ad hoc networks.

European Journal of Scientific Research. 83. 475-492.

Routing is the process of selecting a path between two hosts to offer them the possibility of communication. The importance of routing stems from the fact that it is the key component for every communication network with multi-hop paths. Routing protocols are challenged with establishing and maintaining multi-hop routes in the face of mobility, bandwidth limitation, and power constraints. Multicast routing provides a path between specific groups of nodes, it allows for one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many communication. Multipath routing provides multiple paths between mobile hosts and allow mobile hosts to use these paths to best increase their network performance through aggregating the resources of multiple paths. Additionally, multipath routing protocols have great potential  to make better use of bandwidth and energy. This paper concerns the benefits of using multiple paths for delivering the traffic load to multicast group members. The Mobile Multipath Multicast Routing Protocol (M3RP) is a novel multicasting
scheme that utilizes a mesh structure to provide multiple routes among multicast group members. Besides the sequence number of each packet and the source ID, M3RP consider the number of hops between the source and destination in route construction.
Group membership and multicast routes are established and updated by the source on demand. This technique makes the protocol robust to mobility and increases the packet delivery ratio. In order to validate our work, simulation experiments were conducted to compare the performance of the new routing algorithm with one of the most powerful protocols that is used for multicast routing in ad hoc networks (ODMRP). Experimental results showed that M3RP outperforms other popular multicast routing protocols and provides higher packet delivery ratio.