Multicasting is effective when its group members are sparse and the speed is low. On the other hand, broadcasting is effective when the group members dense and the speed are high. Since mobile ad hoc networks are highly dynamic in nature, either of the above two strategies can be adopted at different scenarios. In this paper, we propose an ant agent based adaptive, multicast protocol that exploits group members desire to simplify multicast routing and invoke broadcast operations in appropriate localized regimes. By reducing the number of group members that participate in the construction of the multicast structure and by providing robustness to mobility by performing broadcasts in densely clustered local regions, the proposed protocol achieves packet delivery statistics that are comparable to that with a pure multicast protocol but with significantly lower overheads. By our simulation results, we show that our proposed protocol achieves increased Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF) with reduced overhead and routing load.
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