A Comprehensive Simulation Study on the Multicast Operation of the AODV Routing Protocol for CBR Traffic in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

In certain applications of MANETs like handling emergency operations, the group communications play a crucial role which demands for multicast routing. Moreover, it is known fact that the on-demand reactive routing protocol AODV is very much suited for the mobile ad-hoc environments. Hence, the multicast routing protocol MAODV (multicast extension of AODV) is considered, to get the benefits of using a single protocol for both unicast and multicast routing. In this paper, MAODV is examined for its multicast routing behavior under various mobility patterns in order to check its suitability for dynamic environments of MANETs, for CBR data traffic. The work is done by varying various multicast routing parameters such as number of multicast receivers per group, number of multicast senders per group and number of multicast groups in a network scenario. Further, a special case where the number of receivers is equal to the number of senders in a multicast group (conferencing) is also simulated for exploring the protocol’s multicast routing behavior thoroughly. The performance of the protocol is analyzed in terms of the QoS evaluation metrics such as packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, average jitter, throughput and normalized routing load. From the graphs, it is observed that the MAODV works well in MANET environments. Moreover, the benefit of multicast routing is clearly visible in terms of increased throughput and reduced routing loads irrespective of the experiment set.