Multicast Routing Protocols with Low Overhead For MANET

This paper presents a thorough survey of current work addressing multicast routing protocols with low control overhead in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many different issues and solutions which witness the need of group management in ad hoc wireless networks. The goal of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the wireless link by sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. However, offering multicast routing with minimum control overhead is very difficult and challenging task. Now a day, various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. All these protocols have their distinguishing features and use different mechanisms to support the different Quality of Services parameters.