Abstract

In mobile ad hoc network, nodes co-operatively form a network independent of any fixed base station infrastructure. Every node in a mobile ad-hoc network can function as a router and forwards the data packets to the other nodes. Multicasting plays an important role whenever group communications are required. Most of the existing multicast routing protocols in mobile ad hoc networks consider only one source in a multicast group and become inefficient when the protocol is extended to multi-source multicasting. In this paper, we propose a unicast forwarded multi-source multicast routing protocol, for ad hoc networks which is having more than one source in a group. Here, the sources of the group also act as a receiver for other sources in that group. The proposed routing method is a cluster based one and avoids the flooding or broadcasting of control packets to form routing structure. On executing source joining and receiver joining procedures, a complete path for multicast data transfer was established. As the join request control packets are forwarded only through cluster-heads and junction nodes, lower amount of control overhead is incurred. Simulation result shows that the proposed protocol maintains the delivery ratio with reduced control overhead and utilizes the bandwidth efficiently.