Multicast Routing for Ad Hoc Networks with Overload Prevention for Group Members

Mobility, quality of service (QoS) support, and multicast routing capability are important requirements for today’s networks. This is a result of the changes in wireless users’ expectations, which favour group-oriented, high-quality, multimedia communication. Ad hoc networks enhanced with QoS multicasting strategies can provide users with these features. This paper defines the building blocks of an ad hoc QoS multicasting (AQM) protocol, which tracks the availability of resources within a node’s neighbourhood based on reservations made previously, and announces it at session initiation. When nodes join a session with certain QoS requirements, this information is updated and used to select the most appropriate routes. AQM is compared to a non-QoS scheme with particular emphasis on preventing overload on multicast group members. It achieves better results through the use of its QoS-related routing decisions, which suggests that QoS is both essential for and applicable to multicast applications in ad hoc networks.