Impact of Mobility on the Performance of Multicast Routing Protocols in MANET

The advent of ubiquitous computing and the proliferation of portable computing devices have raised the importance of mobile ad-hoc network. A major challenge lies in adapting multicast communication into such environments where mobility and link failures are inevitable. The purpose of this paper is to study impact of mobility models in performance of multicast routing protocols in MANET. In this work, three widely used mobility models such as Random Way Point, Reference Point Group and Manhattan mobility models and three popular multicast routing protocols such as On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol, Multicast Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector Routing protocol and Adaptive Demand driven Multicast Routing protocol have been chosen and implemented in NS2. Several experiments have been carried out to study the relative strengths, weakness and applicability of multicast protocols to these mobility models.