Mobile agents aided multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks

Multicast routing protocols proposed for mobile ad hoc networks have certain limitations. Most of these protocols try to discover the route on-demand by flooding route request messages, which results in increased end-to-end latency and also consumes considerable amount of network bandwidth. These limitations make protocols not suitable for real-time multimedia communication. In this paper, we have presented an efficient mobile agents aided multicast routing (MAMR) protocol which overcomes these limitations. The protocol is a hybrid protocol where intelligent mobile agents can been integrated with existing on-demand multicast routing protocols such as multicast ad hoc on-demand distance vector (MAODV) routing protocol, on-demand multicast routing protocol (ODMRP) routing protocol and others. Here, the mobile agents move around the network and collect the routing information. This routing information assists on-demand multicast routing protocols in discovering the route in a definite path instead of flooding the route request messages, thereby achieving better end-to-end latency and reduced control traffic in the network. We have used MAODV protocol as an underlying protocol with mobile agents. The proposed MAMR protocol and MAODV have been compared through extensive simulations with end-to-end latency, packet delivery ratio and control overhead as performance parameters