Review Article Multicast Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Comparative Survey and Taxonomy Osamah S. Badarneh and Michel Kadoch | Hindawi Publishing Corporation EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking Volume 2009 Article ID 764047 42 pages doi 2009 764047 Review Article Multicast Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks A Comparative Survey and Taxonomy Osamah S. Badarneh and Michel Kadoch Department de Genie Electrique Ecole de Technologie Superieure Universite du Quebec Montreal Canada H3C 1k3 Correspondence should be addressed to Osamah S. Badarneh Received 14 January 2009 Accepted 14 June 2009 Recommended by Sudip Misra Multicasting plays a crucial role in many applications of mobile ad hoc networks MANETs . It can significantly improve the performance of these networks the channel capacity in mobile ad hoc networks especially single-channel ones capacity is a more appropriate term than bandwidth capacity is measured in bits s and bandwidth in Hz and battery power of which are limited. In the past couple of years a number of multicast routing protocols have been proposed. In spite of being designed for the same networks these protocols are based on different design principles and have different functional features when they are applied to the multicast problem. This paper presents a coherent survey of existing multicasting solutions for MANETs. It presents various classifications of the current multicast routing protocols discusses their operational features along with their advantages and limitations and provides a comparison of their characteristics according to several distinct features and performance parameters. Moreover this paper proposes classifying the existing multicast protocols into three categories according to their layer of operation namely the network layer the application layer and the MAC layer. It also extends the existing classification system and presents a comparison between them. Copyright 2009 O. S. Badarneh and M. Kadoch. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution .
