The design, implementation, and performance evaluation of the on-demand multicast routing protocol in multihop wireless networks

Multicasting has emerged as one of the most focused areas in the field of n etworking. As the technology and popularity of the lnternet grow, applicati ons such as video conferencing that require the multicast feature are becom ing more widespread. Another interesting recent development has been the em ergence of dynamically reconfigurable wireless ad hoc networks to interconn ect mobile users for applications ranging from disaster recovery to distrib uted collaborative computing. In this article we describe the On-Demand Mul ticast Routing Protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. ODMRP is a mesh-based, rather than conventional tree-based, multicast scheme and uses a forwarding group concept (only a subset of nodes forwards the multicast packets via s coped flooding) It applies on-demand procedures to dynamically build routes and maintain multicast group membership. We also describe our implementati on of the protocol in a real laptop testbed.