MFACE: A Multicast Backbone-Assisted Face Traversal Algorithm for Arbitrary Planar Ad Hoc and Sensor Network Topologies

Face is a well-known localized routing protocol for ad hoc and sensor networks which guarantees delivery of the message as long as a path exists between the source and the destination. This is achieved by employing a left/right hand rule to route the message along the faces of a planar topology. Although face was developed for the unicast case, it has recently been used in combination with multicasting protocols, where there are multiple destinations. Some of the proposed solutions handle each destination separately and lead thus to increased energy consumption. Extensions of face recovery to the multicast case described so far are either limited to certain planar graphs or do not provide delivery guarantees. A recently described scheme employs multicast face recovery based on a so called multicast backbone. A multicast backbone is a Euclidean spanning tree which contains at least the source and the destination nodes. The idea of backbone assisted routing it to follow the edges of the backbone in order to deliver a multicast message to all spanned destination nodes. The existing backbone face routing scheme is however limited to a certain planar graph type and a certain backbone construction. One of the key aspects of the multicast face algorithm MFACE we propose in this work is that it may be applied on top of any planar topology. Moreover, our solution may be used as a generic framework since it is able to work with any arbitrary multicast backbone. In MFACE, any edge of the backbone originated at the source node will generate a new copy of the message which will be routed toward the set of destination nodes spanned by the corresponding edge. Whenever the message arrives at a face edge intersected by a backbone edge different from the initial edge, the message is split into two copies, both handling a disjoint subset of the multicast destinations which are defined by splitting the multicast backbone at that intersection point

Review of multicast QoS routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks

A Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is consisting of a collection of wireless mobile nodes, which form a temporary network without relying on any existing infrastructure or centralized administration. Since the bandwidth of MANETs is limited and shared between the participating nodes in the network, it is important to efficiently utilize the network bandwidth. Multicasting can minimize the link bandwidth consumption and reduce the communication cost by sending the same data to multiple participants. Multicast service is critical for applications that need collaboration of team of users. Multicasting in MANETs becomes a hot research area due to the increasing popularity of group communication applications such as video conferencing and interactive television. Recently, multimedia and group-oriented computing gains more popularity for users of ad hoc networks. So, effective Quality of Service (QoS) multicasting protocol plays significant role in MANETs. In this paper, we are presenting an overview of set of the most recent QoS multicast routing protocols that have been proposed in order to provide the researchers with a clear view of what has been done in this field

Localized Minimum Spanning Tree Based Multicast Routing with Energy-Efficient Guaranteed Delivery in Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks

We present a minimum spanning tree based energy aware multicast protocol (MSTEAM), which is a localized geographic multicast routing scheme designed for ad hoc and sensor networks. It uses locally-built minimum spanning trees (MST) as an efficient approximation of the optimal multicasting backbone. Using a MST is highly relevant in the context of dynamic wireless networks since its computation has a low time complexity (O(n log n)). Moreover, our protocol is fully localized and requires nodes to gather information only on 1-hop neighbors, which is common assumption in existing work. In MSTEAM, a message split occurs when the MST over the current node and the set of destinations has multiple edges originated at the current node. Destinations spanned by each of these edges are grouped together, and for each of these subsets the best neighbor is selected as the next hop. This selection is based on a cost over progress metric, where the progress is approximated by subtracting the weight of the MST over a given neighbor and the subset of destinations to the weight of the MST over the current node and the subset of destinations. Since such greedy localized scheme may lead the message to a void area (i.e., there is no neighbor providing positive progress toward the destinations), we also propose a completely new multicast generalization of the well-know face recovery mechanism. We provide a theoretical analysis proving that MSTEAM is loop-free and always achieves delivery of the multicast message, as long as a path exists between the source node and the destinations. Our experimental results demonstrate that MSTEAM is highly energy-efficient, outperforms the best existing localized multicast scheme and is almost as efficient as a centralized scheme in high densities