135 Research Article International Journal of Current Engineering and Technology ISSN 2277 - 4106 © 2013 INPRESSCO. All Rights Reserved. Available at http://inpressco.com/category/ijcet Performance Comparison of Mesh based and Tree based Multicast Routing Protocols in MANETs Garima Sharma a* and Dinesh Arora a a Department of ECE, SDDIET, Barwala, Haryana, India Accepted 5 Jan. 2013, Available online 1March 2013, Vol.3, No.1 (March 2013) Abstract Multicast routing is a key technology for modern communication networks. It sends a single copy of a message from a source to multiple receivers over a communication link that is shared by the paths to the receivers. This is especially appropriate in wireless environments where bandwidth is scarce and many users are sharing the same wireless channels. In particular, for WMNs, multicast can represent a huge enhancement of the network capacity by taking advantage of links which can be shared by multiple users to receive the same data, which is transmitted only once. To support multicasting, several multicast routing protocols are designed for Internet and Ad hoc networks. This paper presents the simulation and analysis of the performance of existing Mesh based and Tree based multicast routing protocols over WMNs. Three prominent multicast routing protocols are selected for performance comparison; they are On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP), Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol (DVMRP) and Protocol Independent Multicast –Dense mode (PIM-DM). Among Therefore, the performance comparison of existing multicast routing protocols over wireless mesh networks is essential in order to analyze their behavior and effectiveness. Qualnet 5.0.2.Our aim is to investigate the relative strength and weaknesses of each protocol. Keywords: DVMRP, ODMRP &PIM-DM ,Computer Network, Routing Protocols, Path loss Models. 1. Introduction 1 An ad-hoc mobile network is a collection of mobile nodes that are dynamically and randomly located in such a manner that the interconnections between nodes are capable of changing on a continual basis. In order to facilitate communication within the network, a routing protocol is used to discover routes between nodes. The primary goal of such an ad-hoc network routing protocol is correct and efficient route establishment between a pair of nodes so that messages may be delivered in a timely manner. In this paper, authors describe PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) capable of supporting sparse mode (SM) and dense mode (DM) operations. In sparse mode, PIM can use shared trees (RPT) or shortest path trees (SPT) to deliver data packets. The availability of these various modes opens questions regarding when each should be used, and the consequences of switching among them dynamically. This paper reports on two specific issues: 1) the overhead tradeoffs between dense mode operations and sparse mode operations. 2) the behaviors of PIM when receivers transitioning from RPT to SPT. Their results illustrate the cross-over point of sparse mode and dense mode overheads, which gives a hint for selecting protocol modes according to the group density metric.(Liming Wei et al, 1995) *Correponding author: Garima Sharma In this paper, authors have developed a multicast routing architecture that efficiently establishes distribution trees across wide area internets, where many groups will be sparsely represented. Efficiency is measured in terms of the router state, control message processing, and data packet processing, required across the entire network in order to deliver data packets to the members of the group. The robustness, flexibility, and scaling properties of this architecture make it well-suited to large heterogeneous internetworks. (Stephen Deering et al, 1996) In this paper, authors describe that a number of different routing protocols proposed for use in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks are based in whole or in part on what can be described as on-demand behavior. By on demand behavior, they mean approaches based only on reaction to the offered traffic being handled by the routing protocol. In this paper, they analyze the use of on-demand behavior in such protocols, focusing on its effect on the routing protocol’s forwarding latency, overhead cost, and route caching correctness, drawing examples from detailed simulation of the dynamic source routing (DSR) protocol. (K. Paul et.al, 1999) In this paper the authors have proposed and evaluated the on-demand multicasting routing mechanism for ad hoc wireless network. This mechanism is a generalization of their previously proposed stability-based unicast routing scheme that relies on determining link stability and path