Supporting multicasting in mobile ad-hoc wireless networks: issues, challenges, and current protocols
The basic philosophy of personal communication services is to provide user-to-user, location independent communication services. The emerging group communication wireless applications, such as multipoint data dissemination and multiparty conferencing tools have made the design and development of efficient multicast techniques in mobile ad-hoc networking environments a necessity and not just a desire. Multicast protocols in mobile ad-hoc networks have been an area of active research for the past couple of years. This paper summarizes the activities and recent advances in this work-in-progress area by identifying the main issues and challenges that multicast protocols are facing in mobile ad-hoc networking environments, and by surveying several existing multicasting protocols. This article presents a classification of the current multicast protocols, discusses the functionality of the individual existing protocols, and provides a qualitative comparison of their characteristics according to several distinct features and performance parameters. Furthermore, since many of the additional issues and constraints associated with the mobile ad-hoc networks are due, to a large extent, to the attribute of user mobility, we also present an overview of research and development efforts in the area of group mobility modeling in mobile ad-hoc networks. Copyright  2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
mobility wireless networks mobile ad-hoc networks multicasting protocols