Performance Comparison of Mesh based and Tree based Multicast Routing Protocols in MANETs

Multicast routing is a key technology for modern communication networks. It sends a single copy of a message from a source to multiple receivers over a communication link that is shared by the paths to the receivers. This is especially appropriate in wireless environments where bandwidth is scarce and many users are sharing the same wireless channels. In particular, for WMNs, multicast can represent a huge enhancement of the network capacity by taking advantage of links which can be shared by multiple users to receive the same data, which is transmitted only once. To support multicasting, several multicast routing protocols are designed for Internet and Ad hoc networks. This paper presents the simulation and analysis of the performance of existing Mesh based and Tree based multicast routing protocols over WMNs. Three prominent multicast routing protocols are selected for performance comparison; they are On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP), Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) and Protocol Independent Multicast –Dense mode (PIM-DM). Among Therefore, the performance comparison of existing multicast routing protocols over wireless mesh networks is essential in order to analyze their behavior and effectiveness. Qualnet 5.0.2.Our aim is to investigate the relative strength and weaknesses of each protocol.