Performance evaluation of on demand multicast routing protocol for ad hoc wireless networks

Multicasting is all the rage these days for its provision of easy access to one connection instantly for everyone, on demand. Consider, in the last couple of years, multicasting has shown the promise of efficiently supporting a variety of applications that are characterized by a closed degree of synergism, typical for many ad-hoc applications currently being worked out. Within the wired networking realm, there exist well established solutions for routing problems to offer an efficient multicasting service. As the nodes go wireless and the notion of mobility of the nodes becomes part of the routing problem, those well established solutions need thorough reworking to provide a fairly high Quality of Service (QOS) in the new environment. This thesis analyzes the performance of a multicast protocol for ad-hoc networks: On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP). We implemented and modified ODMRP to analyse variants of the protocol. This work concerns itself with improving the performance of multicasting service in ad hoc networks using the mesh structure of ODMRP. ODMRP builds and maintains a mesh based on soft state. Our results show that ODMRP's characteristic high overheads could be curtailed down to a reasonable level without losing much in terms of throughput and packet delivery ratio.