Abstract
In this paper, we present Localized Tree Change Multicast Protocol (LTMP), a novel source based multicast protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks with the underlying theme being that a forwarding group is maintained by enabling a forwarding flag at each of the nodes without the need to periodically flood the network with the membership status of the group nodes. LTMP also provides end-to-end signaling between the sources and receivers. We compare the performance of LTMP with existing source based multicast schemes. The protocols differ in the nature of the control traffic generated to maintain the multicast tree and the state information maintained for each multicast group. Our results show that in many scenarios LTMP offers better performance than the existing schemes, a consequence of the reduced control overhead and its ability to perform localized tree changes without the need for maintaining upstream information allowing for stable multicast delivery and the addition of too many forwarding nodes.