Protocol Independent Multicasting in Wireless Mesh Networks

Multicast in wireless networks received a lot of attention, from ad-hoc networks, to structured multi-hop meshes. However, the support of the standard Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) protocol has been dismissed as non important (or non feasible), given that its straightforward application on wireless networks does not work properly. In this work we analyze the reasons why PIM standard implementations interacts badly with wireless networks and propose simple countermeasures that do not require modifications of the standard, but only small modifications of the implementation. The Dense Mode version of PIM is implemented in ns-3 and results are presented showing the performance of the protocol and its overheads in mesh networks with fixed mesh routers and both fixed and mobile end-user clients.