LITERATURE REVIEW

Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) PIM [ 3 ] is a multicast routing protocol that does not depend on a specific unicast routing protocol. PIM uses a set of special routers called Rendezvous Points (RPs) such that any receiver who wants to join the multicast group needs to send an explicit join request to a unique RP determined based on the multicast group address. The receivers explicitly join the RP resulting in the formation of a unidirectional shared RP-tree. Senders, on the other hand, do not explicitly join the RP but send their data encapsulated in register messages directly to the RP for distribution using the shared RP-tree. A sender who wants to multicast to the group starts by sending encapsulated packets to the corresponding RP, which then forwards the packets to the attached receivers. If the senders traffic increases beyond some threshold, the shortest path route is set up between the sender and the corresponding RP. In addition, the intermediate routers between the RP and the receivers switch from the RP-based shared tree to a source-based shortest path tree. PIM uses soft state mechanisms to maintain the tree. That is, control messages are sent periodically by the relevant routers to refresh the state information. No explicit teardown mechanism is needed to remove states when a group ceases to exist.

On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol ODMRP [2] is a mesh based rather than a conventional tree based scheme and uses a forwarding group concept (only a subset of nodes forwards the multicast packets via scoped flooding). By maintaining a mesh instead of a tree, the drawbacks of multicast trees in ad hoc networks like frequent tree reconfiguration and non-shortest path in a shared tree are avoided. In ODMRP, group membership and multicast routes are established by the source on demand when a multicast source has packets to send, but no route to the multicast group, it broadcasts JoinQuery control packets to the entire network. This control packet is periodically broadcast to refresh the membership information and updates routes as shown in the fig. When the JoinQuery packet reaches a multicast receiver, it creates and broadcasts Join-Reply to its neighbors. When it has been received by the node, it checks if the next hop node id of one of the entries in Join Reply table matches its own id. If it is does, the node realizes that it is on the path to the source and becomes the part of the forwarding group by setting the FG_FLAG (Forwarding Group flag). When receiving a multicast data packet, a node forwards it only when it is not a duplicate, hence minimizing traffic overhead. Because the nodes maintain soft state, finding the optimal flooding interval is critical to ODMRP performance. ODMRP uses location and movement information to predict the duration of time that routes will remain valid. With the predicted time of route disconnection, a "join data" packet is flooded when route breaks of

ongoing data sessions are imminent. It reveals that ODMRP is better suited for ad hoc networks in terms of bandwidth utilization.

Multicast Open Shortest Path First MOSPF protocol [1] is a multicast enhancement of OSPFv2 protocol to provide efficient multicasting within an autonomous system. Routers in MOSPF maintain a current image of the whole network topology through the unicast OSPF protocol. This is achieved by periodic broadcast of a new type of link state advertisement (LSA), also known as the groupmembership-LSA. It then allows routers to build efficient source-based trees or a shortest-path tree using link-state information and Dijkstras algorithm. These trees are constructed on demand basis without even flooding the first datagram of a group transmission and the results of the calculations are cached for use by subsequent packets. Multicast datagram, which are forwarded, travel the shortest path since a separate tree is built for each datagrams source and receiver group pair. Using MOSPF, it is possible to get a faster network convergence than DVMRP. It also adjusts rapidly to availability of network resources or changes in group membership. However, the flooding of group membership information is the predominant factor that preventing MOSPF being applicable over the wide area networks. Another limiting factor is the computational cost. This protocol involves heavy computation at each router and requires a lot of exchange of topology and membership information. Another problem with MOSPF is that it does not have the ability to "tunnel" multicast datagrams through non-multicast routers. In one paper,

an extension of MOSPF is proposed to achieve tunnel multicasting, which aims at reducing protocol overhead by exempting non-branching nodes from processing routing information. In another paper extension for MOSPF is proposed to support multicast communications. The authors proposed a self-feedback mechanism controlled by an annealing strategy and embedded into the Hopfield neural network to calculate the shortest-path tree for MOSPF Protocol.

Qualnet Qualnet [ 4 ] has been chosen since it met most of the requirements. In particular, it comes with: (i) an extensive set of pre-built models, protocols and algorithms, (ii) a good level of acceptance from the scientific community, (iii) an excellent scalability, (iv) a rather good, highly modular, software design, (v) a satisfactory level of usability, modifiability and expandability, (vi) advanced graphical and mathematical tools for experiment building, monitoring and postprocessing, (vii) good documentation, (viii) possibility of parallel and/or distributed implementations, (ix) possibility to specify a realistic 3D model of the environment. Qualnet is a scalable network simulation library that was designed with the primary goal of simulating large, high-fidelity models of wired, wireless, and mixed networks in an efficient manner. It was designed to achieve modular design for easy comparison of protocols under uniform conditions, detailed and accurate models, efficient execution, and transparent parallel execution for further scalability and runtime efficiency. These significant features encouraged us to use QualNet (Evaluation version) for the study. The Qualnet 5.0.2 simulator is used for the analysis. The IEEE 802.11 for wireless LANs is used as the MAC layer protocol. QualNet Developer is a collection of five different tools: QualNet Simulator: The simulator itself, fast and scalable. QualNet Animator: A graphical user interface for intuitive experiment setup and animation tool. QualNet Designer: A finite state machine tool for custom protocol development. QualNet Analyzer: A statistical graphing tool for evaluating the metrics. QualNet Tracer: A packet-level visualization tool for viewing the packets going up and down the protocol stack.