Abstract

Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is an active topic of research for its potential of providing pervasive services anywhere and anytime, even though some challenges need to be handled first. In contrast to conventional networks, ad hoc networks are formed by a set of devices that communicate without using a pre-existing network infrastructure. Multicast is an efficient transmission scheme for supporting group communication in networks. The concept of overlay networks enables multicast to be deployed as a service network rather than a network primitive mechanism, allowing deployment over heterogeneous networks without the need of universal network support. In this thesis, we propose an overlay multicast framework to handle multicasts in MANET environment in a flexible way. Our approach is using SIP to discover peers to set up a meshed overlay network first, then overlay multicast trees are set up on demand. To cope with the bandwidth limitation problem, the Dominating Set Based and Multi-Recipient routing are adopted, so that the virtual meshed network topology gradually adopts the changes in the underlying network in a distributed manner and the multicast tree is adapted to the updated topology information accordingly. A prototype is built to evaluate the feasibility and performance of the proposed framework.