A QoS multicast routing protocol for clustering mobile ad hoc networks

The provision of Quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees is of utmost importance for the development of the multicast services. These multicast services have been used by various continuous media applications. For example, the multicast backbone (Mbone) of the Internet has been used to transport real time audio/video for news, video conferencing and distance learning. This paper presents a QoS multicast routing protocol for clustering mobile ad hoc networks (QMRPCAH). It can provide QoS-sensitive routes in a scalable and flexible way, in the network environment with mobility. In the proposed QMRPCAH scheme, each local node only needs to maintain local multicast routing information and/or summary information of other clusters (or domains) but does not require any global ad hoc network states to be maintained. The QMRPCAH also allows any ad hoc group member can join/leave the multicast group dynamically, and supports multiple QoS constraints. This paper presents formal description and main procedures for realizing routing decision process of the QMRPCAH, and the proof of correctness and complexity analysis of the protocol. It also presents a theoretical analysis of the mobility in the mobile ad hoc network environment. The performance measures of QMRPCAH are evaluated using simulation. The studies show that QMRPCAH can provide an available approach to QoS multicast routing for mobile ad hoc networks.