Abstract—Multicasting is intended for group-oriented communication services. One particularly challenging environment for multicast is a mobile ad-hoc network(MANET), where the network topology can change randomly and rapidly, at unpredictable times. As a result, several specific multicast routing protocols for MANET have been proposed. Multicast approaches can generally be categorized into two: Proactive and On-demand. The proactive approach pre-computes and maintains routes to all nodes, including nodes to which no packets are being sent. The on-demand approach creates the routes between nodes that are solely determined when they are explicitly needed to route packets. Multicasting protocols can also be categorized based on the structure used to forward multicast packets which are tree and mesh based. The uses of on-demand routing approaches have been shown to have significant benefits in terms of reducing the routing protocol overheads. Therefore, this paper focuses on performance of tree and mesh based multicast routing protocols over MANET. This paper also evaluates well known multicast routing protocols, like on-demand multicast routing protocol (ODMRP), protocol independent protocol- dense mode (PIM-DM) and multicast open shortest path first (MOSPF) under a wide range of network conditions and realistic scenarios. More specifically, the concern is to characterize the merits of tree and mesh-based protocols over various ranges of MANET scenarios based on representative performance metrics. The simulation environment is Qualnet-5.0. As a result this paper investigates the relative strength, weaknesses and applicability of each protocol to diverse situation.

Index Terms—Computer network, routing protocols, path loss models.

The authors are with the PEC University of Technology, Chandigarh(e-mail: nagsah@yahoo.com).

Cite: Nagendra Sah, Neelam Rup Prakash, and Deepak Bagai, "Performance Analysis of Multicasting Routing Protocols in MANETs," International Journal of Computer and Communication Engineering vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 269-272 , 2012.