Bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees in large-scale ad-hoc networks

The purpose of this paper is to construct bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees for QoS applications in large-scale ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Recent routing protocols and multicast protocols in large-scale MANETs adopt two-tier infrastructures to avoid the inefficiency of the flooding. Hosts with a maximal number of neighbors are often chosen as backbone hosts (BHs) to forward packets. Most likely, these BHs will be traffic concentrations/bottlenecks of the network. In addition, since host mobility is not taken into consideration in BH selection, these two-tier schemes will suffer from more lost packets if highly mobile hosts are selected as BHs. In this paper, a new multicast protocol is proposed for partitioning large-scale MANET into two-tier infrastructures. In the proposed two-tier multicast protocol, hosts with fewer hops and longer remaining connection time to the other hosts will be selected as BHs. The objective is not only to obtain short and stable multicast routes, but also to construct a stable two-tier infrastructure with fewer lost packets. Further, previous MANET quality-of-service (QoS) routing/multicasting protocols determined bandwidth-satisfied routes for QoS applications. Some are implemented as a probing scheme, but the scheme is inefficient due to high overhead and slow response. On the contrary, the others are implemented by taking advantage of routing and link information to reduce the inefficiency. However, the latter scheme suffers from two bandwidth-violation problems. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to avoid the two problems, and it is integrated with the proposed two-tier multicast protocol to construct bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees for QoS applications in large-scale MANETs. The proposed algorithm aims to achieve better network performance by minimizing the number of forwarders in a tree.