Support for multicast services is crucial for mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) to become a viable alternative to infrastructured networks. Efficient multicasting in MANETs faces challenges not encountered in other types of networks such as the mobility of nodes, the tenuous status of communication links, limited resources, and indefinite knowledge of the network topology. This thesis addresses these challenges by providing a framework and architecture with proactive and reactive components to support multicasting in MANETs emphasizing reliability and efficiency of end-to-end packet delivery. The architecture includes the Robust Multicast Routing protocol (RoMR) to provide multicast services to multicast applications. RoMR's proactive component calculates multiple multicast trees based on the prediction of future availability of the links and the assumption that the trees will become disconnected over time. The reactive components respond to changes in the network topology due to the mobility of the nodes and to changes in the multicast group's membership. Sending redundant data packets over multiple paths further enhances the reliability at the cost of an increase in the use of network resources. RoMR uses approximations to Steiner trees during tree formation and forward error correction encoding techniques during packet transmission in order to counteract this increase. To avoid additional network traffic, trees are distributed only when the existing trees cannot be easily patched to accommodate changes in topology or group membership. The novelty of the proposed protocol stems from integrating techniques that have not previously been combined into a multicasting protocol and a unique method to calculate the relative weights of the links. In addition to the specifications of the protocol, a simulation framework was developed to test different implementations of the various components of RoMR. Simulations compared the performance of the basic version of RoMR to a version that ignored link weights, and to a link-state multicast protocol currently being considered by the Internet Engineering Task Force. A statistical analysis of the results showed that RoMR performed better overall, than the other two protocols
