The diverse nature of mobile wireless ad hoc networks, or MANETs, makes it almost impossible for a single routing protocol to perform well under a wide range of operating conditions. We propose an adaptive approach to group communication that allow nodes to switch among different routing protocols on the fly in order to adapt to current network conditions. Considering that MANET's are generally deployed in mission critical applications, our goal is to provide high reliability and Simeliness guarantees in the presence of a wide range of network conditions (e.g., mobility, network load). To this end we develop an adaptive flooding protocol in which nodes can dynamically switch among different flooding variations, namely scoped-, plain-, or hyper flooding based on their perception of current network conditions. We employ relative velocity and perceived network load as the criteria nodes use to switch among protocols. Simulation results comparing our adaptive protocol against two of the best performing MANET multicast protocols, namely ODMRP and M-AODV, show considerable performance benefits, under various MANET scenarios. We thus argue that the proposed protocol can be used as the basis for developing adaptive, integrated routing techniques for the integrated media networks of the future.
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