A Survey on Multicast Routing Protocols for Performance Evaluation in Wireless Sensor Network

Multicast is a process used to transfer same message to multiple receivers at the same time. This paper presents the simulation and analysis of the performance of six different multicast routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). They are On Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP), Protocol for Unified Multicasting through Announcement (PUMA), Multicast Adhoc On demand Distance Vector Protocol (MAODV), Overlay Boruvka-based Adhoc Multicast Protocol (OBAMP), Application Layer Multicast Algorithm (ALMA) and enhanced version of ALMA (ALMA-H) for WSN. Among them, ODMRP, MAODV and PUMA are reactive protocols while OBAMP, ALMA and ALMA-H are proactive protocols. This paper compares the performance of these protocols with common parameters such as Throughput, Reliability, End-to-End delay and Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) with increasing the numbers of nodes and increasing the speed of the nodes. The main objective of this work is to select the efficient multicast routing protocol for WSN among six multicast routing protocol based on relative strength and weakness of each protocol. The summary of above six multicast routing protocols is presented with a table of different performance characteristics. Experimental result shows that ODMRP attains higher throughput, reliability and higher packet delivery ratio than other multicast routing protocol, while incurring far less end-to-end delay.