Overlay, Borůvka-based, Ad-hoc multicast protocol: description and performance analysis

This paper presents a novel Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANET) multicast protocol, named Overlay Borůvka-based Ad-hoc Multicast Protocol (OBAMP), and evaluates its performance. OBAMP is an overlay protocol: it runs only in the end-systems belonging to the multicast group. OBAMP has three distinctive features, which give to the protocol a good performance in terms of distribution efficiency: (i) its distribution tree closely resembles the minimum spanning tree; (ii) it exploits broadcast communications; (iii) its design limits not only overlay signaling but also network-layer signaling. In addition, OBAMP can cope with node failures in a very short time. As a consequence, OBAMP has a low latency and a high delivery ratio, even when the group size increases. To prove these statements, we analyze the performance of OBAMP with ns-2 and compare it with three state-of-the-art protocols, namely ODMRP (a network-layer protocol), ALMA, and AMRoute (two overlay protocols). The overlay protocols are assumed to use AODV as underlying routing protocol. Also, we stress that we have implemented OBAMP, in Java, and we have tested it on the field, to prove its feasibility; to allow fellow researchers to reproduce and test our work we published all simulation and implementation codes.