LAUSR

Abstract Understanding the multicast delay performance of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) lays the foundation for multicast-intensive applications in future highly heterogeneous wireless network environments. This paper explores, for the first time, the multicast delay performance of MANETs under a general cooperative multicast scheme for routing protocol. The multicast scheme is based on two-hop relay multicast algorithm, where a packet can be sent to several relay nodes by source node, and destination nodes receive the packet from these relay nodes or their source node. The destination nodes may serve as relay nodes to forward packet to other ones with some probability. The multicast scheme is general in the sense that it can cover the available two-hop relay multicast algorithms with full cooperation and non-cooperation as special cases. Moreover, our multicast scheme can also cover two-hop relay unicast algorithm as special case when the number of destination nodes equals to one. To study the multicast delay performance, we first develop a Markov chain theoretical framework to fully characterize the packet delivery process under the general cooperative multicast scheme. With the help of this theoretical framework, we derive analytical expressions for the mean and variance of multicast delay. Finally, we present extensive simulation and theoretical results to validate our multicast delay analysis and to illustrate the impacts of network parameters on multicast delay performance.