A Novel Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, how to achieve the multicast communication is a challenging task due to the fact that the topology may change frequently and communication links may be broken because of users' mobility. We introduced MANHSI (Multicast for Ad hoe Network with hybrid Swarm Intelligence) protocol, which relies on a swarm intelligence based optimization technique to learn and discover efficient multicast connectivity. The proposed protocol instances that it can quickly and efficiently establish initial multicast connectivity and/or improved the resulting connectivity via different optimization techniques. Using a simulation approach, we investigated performance of the proposed algorithm through a comparison with an algorithm previously proposed in the literature. Based on the numerical results, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm performs well.