| MiCoN (Minimum-Cost Neighbor) is a new on-demand multicast routing protocol for mobile wireless ad hoc networks. Multicast routing in MiCoN is based on a new multi-route unicast routing protocol for maintaining routes between the network nodes and all group receivers. This routing is guaranteed to be loop-free even in the presence of dropped packets in the wireless network. MiCoN packet forwarding is based on a new local approximation of the optimal multicast tree, achieved by modeling multicasting as a Facility-Location-Problem. Evaluated in ns-2 simulations. MiCoN outperforms ADMR, the previously best performing on-demand multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. To support this evaluation, I have also developed a new simulation model for sparse movement scenarios in ad hoc networks. MiCoN achieves better performance than ADMR, in terms of its packet delivery ratio, latency, and overhead in dense scenarios, and substantially outperforms ADMR on these metrics in sparse networks. |
