Stateless Multicast Protocol for Ad-Hoc Networks

Multicast routing protocols based on creation of a multicast tree (or mesh), which requires the individual nodes to maintain state information. In dynamic networks with bursty traffic, where long periods of silence are expected between the bursts of data, this multicast state maintenance adds a large amount of communication, processing, and memory overhead for no benefit to the application. In this paper we have developed a stateless receiver-based multicast protocol that simply uses a list of the multicast destination members addresses (sinks), embedded in packet headers, to enable receivers to decide the best way to forward the multicast traffic. Proposed protocol, exploits the knowledge of the geographic locations of the nodes to remove the need for costly state maintenance which makes it ideally suitable for dynamic networks. We propose advancement to the RBMulticast protocol by adding ETX metric for selection of forwarder for the packet from source to destination. Earlier protocols have used number of hop as a metric for transmission of packet from source to destination. The ETX metric make RBMulticast protocol as high throughput and energy efficient protocol by reducing number of transmission required for a single packet. We implement this protocol using java, and show the increased throughput and effectiveness of modified RBMulticast. Keywords— Wireless networks, Stateless Routing, Multicasting, ETX metric.