AN ANT-BASED MULTICASTING PROTOCOL IN MOBILE AD-HOC NETWORK.

Multicasting protocols deliver data packets from a source node to multiple receivers, and serve a very important function in mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). In this paper, a novel receiver-initiated soft-state probabilistic multicasting protocol (RISP) for MANETs is proposed. RISP is inspired by the ant colony's route-seeking mechanism, in which an individual ant chooses the optimal path to its destination through cooperation with others in a totally distributed manner. Imitating the behaviour of ants in nature, RISP introduces probabilistic forwarding and soft-state for making relay decisions that are automatically adaptive to node mobility in MANETs. Compared with other protocols, we show by computer simulations that RISP has lower delivery redundancy, while achieving higher delivery ratio at all mobility scenarios. Furthermore, RISP has lower control overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]