A Team Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Team multicast identifies clusters of nodes with same affinity as teams and manages the multicast membership information using the unit of team rather than dealing with individual node members. The source propagates a data packet to each subscribed team’s leader and each leader forwards the data to the entire team. But none of the existing work on team multicasting consider the QoS metrics of the team leader like power, bandwidth etc. In this paper, we propose a QoS-aware team multicast protocol for MANETs, which gives a better solution to the above said problems. In our proposed protocol, the team leaders are selected based on the QoS metrics like bandwidth, residual energy and stability. Thus, the problem of link breakage can be reduced proactively. In case of link breakage occurring at any place of the network, a new team leader is selected in reactive basis. This avoids the delay in route repair mechanism. By simulation results, we show that the proposed protocol achieves better packet delivery ratio with reduced delay and overhead.