Improving routing distance for geographic multicast with Fermat points in mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), each node has the ability to transmit, receive, and route packets, and also moves through the field either randomly or in accordance with a pre-planned route. For enhancing the performance of MANETs, reducing the routing distance is a primary concern. For either ad hoc or static networks, the problem of minimizing the overall routing distance during multicasting is NP-complete. Therefore, it is difficult to determine an optimal solution. This paper presents an efficient geographic multicast protocol, designated as GMFP, based on the use of Fermat points. The objective of GMFP is to improve the overall routing distance for multicast tasks. Through a series of simulations, it is shown that GMFP outperforms the conventional Position-Based Multicast protocol and FERMA protocol in terms of the total routing distance, the packet transmission delay, the packet delivery ratio, and the node energy consumption. The performance improvements provided by GMFP are apparent as the scale of the network topology increases.