Reliable Multicast in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Abstract

From applications involving human collaboration to critical network services like autonomous management and security, many target applications envisioned for multihop wireless networks[3] benefit from a network multicast. However, most network multicast services of today offer some form of "best-effort" delivery which lacks any end-to-end recovery mechanisms. While many ad hoc mechanisms have been developed over the years for adding end-to-end recovery to unreliable delivery, multicast poses several unique challenges related to both the size of the network and the number of multicast sessions and session participants; this problem deserves special attention in wireless networks with relatively scarce transmission resources. For these reasons, we conducted simulations with one such reliable multicast mechanism. Specifically, Scalable Reliable Multicast (SRM)[14] provides a framework for developing applications which both benefit from network multicast and incorporate end-to-end recovery mechanisms. In this paper, we have built upon the existing multicast, simulation infrastructure, which is using FGMP protocol[3], to better understand the overall suitability of SRM in wireless environments. A unicast patching scheme is proposed to reduce the broadcast overhead of SRM and thus improves the performance.