Hop-by-hop multicast transport for mobile ad hoc wireless networks

Abstract

Multicast transport is a challenging problem because the source must provide congestion control and reliability for a tree, rather than a single path. This problem is made even more difficult in mobile ad hoc networks due to problems caused by contention, spatial reuse, and mobility. In this paper, we design a hop-by-hop multicast transport protocol, which pushes transport functionality into the core of the network. Although this requires per-flow state, a hop-by-hop approach simplifies congestion control, enables local recovery of lost packets, and provides low delay and efficient use of wireless capacity. We use a simulation study to demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and compare its efficiency to application-layer multicast.