PARMA: A POWER AWARE RELIABLE MULTICASTING ALGORITHM FOR MOBILE AD HOC NETWORKS

O.M. Al-Jarrah∗ and B.H. Sababha∗∗

Keywords

Abstract

Multicasting in mobile ad hoc networks has found many real-life applications such as teleconferencing, video conferencing, and multi- user gaming. Despite the fact that multicasting can utilize the broadcast nature of the network, it has faced many challenges, such as limited node power. One of the multicast routing protocols that have used an unconventional metric to build the multicast route is the Reliable Multicasting Algorithm (RMA). The algorithm uses the link lifetime as the main routing metric, which represents the reliability and stability of the link. Despite its excellent performance in terms of packet delivery ratio and overhead, it is believed that this protocol is not realistic because it did not consider power consumption and its effect on battery lifetime. In this paper, we enhance the RMA protocol to make links between a source and destination more stable by introducing a new metric that depends on the youngest rather than the average lifetime. In addition, we introduced a new metric to make the protocol power aware through the use of the remaining battery life (RBL) metric. The route decision was improved by combining the values of these two metrics in a unified metric that represents the reliability and stability of the path. Route decision in the new power-aware protocol is taken in a manner such that the longest living path would be chosen, at the same time not being greedy in killing some nodes. Simulation results show the proposal has achieved significant performance improvement in data delivery ratio over the RMA protocol.

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