Multicasting in ad-hoc networks

Multicast communication has been used for a wide range of applications. From video-conferencing to mass software and information distribution, most of these applications were being used in intranets or in the MBONE initially. Now some Internet service providers support some of these multicasting applications in their backbones.; Recently, wireless technology became widely available, through the ubiquitous wireless LAN cards. These cards allow users to move freely around a room, a building or even around a restricted neighborhood area and still keep connectivity to the Internet. Despite the initial security flaws, this new class of equipment has the merit of exposing the wider public to the freedom from cables and wires.; Given the increasing availability of both technologies, this thesis investigates two different ways to bring multicasting to a class of wireless mobile networks called ad-hoc networks. First, we introduce the core-assisted multicast protocol (CAMP). It is a multicast routing protocol, i.e., it is in charge of propagating multicast group membership information to intermediate nodes so that data traffic coming from senders can find the correct path and arrive in a best-effort fashion at all receivers of the multicast group. Different routing approaches are studied, and a comparison is made to a similar protocol.; In the second part of this work, we propose the reliable multicast protocol for ad-hoc networks (RETA). RETA provides the delivery of an ordered contiguous sequence of data packets from one sender to many receivers in an ad-hoc network. It is designed to support applications based on bulk data transfer, like files, images and software packages.; The core to its support of node mobility, and also what makes the protocol unique, is the dynamic repair server management mechanism. a RETA receiver attempts to dynamically switch among nodes that assist in the data packet retransmission when one of these nodes becomes unresponsive. A study of the performance of the repair server management mechanism in a mobile network is presented.