A Comprehensive paper for Multicasting Routing Protocol

This review paper presents an exhaustive survey on the different categories of multicast routing protocols that have been proposed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). MANET multicast routing protocols are primarily classified as tree-based and mesh-based protocols depending on the underlying topology used for communication. Tree-based protocols are further classified to source-tree based and shared-tree based depending on whether the tree is rooted at the multicast source or a common node. Further, there are several subcategories of source-tree based and shared-tree based multicast routing protocols. The mesh-based multicast protocols are primarily categorized to source-initiated and receiver-initiated protocols depending on which entity (the source node or the receiver nodes) initiates the mesh formation. In this paper, we will explain in detail the working of eleven different multicast routing protocols, covering all of the sub-categories of tree-based and mesh-based routing protocols.