• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.329-342
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• 2003

Most of the existing multicast routing protocols for ad-hoc networks do not take into account the efficiency of the protocol for the cases when there are large number of sources in the multicast group, resulting in either large overhead or poor data delivery ratio when the number of sources is large. In this paper, we propose a multicast routing protocol for ad-hoc networks, which particularly considers the scalability of the protocol in terms of the number of sources in the multicast groups. The proposed protocol designates a set of sources as the core sources. Each core source is a root of each tree that reaches all the destinations of the multicast group. The union of these trees constitutes the data delivery mesh, and each of the non-core sources finds the nearest core source in order to delegate its data delivery. For the efficient operation of the proposed protocol, it is important to have an appropriate number of core sources. Having too many of the core sources incurs excessive control and data packet overhead, whereas having too little of them results in a vulnerable and overloaded data delivery mesh. The data delivery mesh is optimally reconfigured through the periodic control message flooding from the core sources, whereas the connectivity of the mesh is maintained by a persistent local mesh recovery mechanism. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves an efficient multicast communication with high data delivery ratio and low communication overhead compared with the other existing multicast routing protocols when there are multiple sources in the multicast group.