Multi-constraints link stable multicast routing protocol in MANETs

In MANETs, real-time multimedia applications make Quality of Service (QoS) support, a crucial issue regarding terms of increased throughput, reduced jitter, and available bandwidth. Most of the existing routing protocols focus on straight forward hop-count metric and are less adaptable to densely distributed and highly mobile networks. Therefore, Multicast communication with QoS in densely populated highly dynamic network an exciting research challenges. The objective of the present paper is to introduce a QoS aware routing metric that determines a reliable forwarding node based on Link Stability cost Function (LSF). A mesh of Multicast routes between Multicast source and destinations has been established using nodes with a maximum LSF. The principle theme underlying our protocol is optimum contention count that can be estimated with the help of received signal strength. The proposed protocol comprises the following stages:(1) Calculation of Link Stability Factor (2) Determination of maximum LSF value (3) Pruning adjacent nodes (4) Creation of a mesh consisting of more stable forwarding nodes (5) Creation of a mobile network in which no node remains isolated, as well as nodes, face lesser contention. Our proposed protocol has been demonstrated on an existing mesh-based Multicast routing protocols, ODMRP. Simulations are carried out on Exata/Cyber simulator, and obtained results are compared with that of ODMRP. The comparative analysis reveals that our protocol is more efficient in contrast to ODMRP, LSMRP, and MMRNS, regarding performance parameters like Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), Average End-to-End Latency and Average Route Lifetime. Also, we have analyzed the impact of minimum and maximum contention count on PDR and delay.