2010 Second International conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies
Agent Based Adaptive Multicast Routing with QoS guarantees in MANETs
G. Santhi1 and Dr.Alamelu Nachiappan2
1 2
Assistant Professor, Department of IT,
Pondicherry Engineering College.
shanthikarthikeyan@yahoo.co.in
Abstract
The emergence of multimedia applications demands
multicasting in MANETs. For such applications QoS
provisioning is a complex and challenging issue. This
paper proposes a QoS aware multicast routing scheme
uses a set of static and mobile agents and ensures QoS
guarantees in terms of bandwidth reservation, delay
constraint, delay-jitter constraint and packet loss to
multicast session. Here the mobile agents move
around the network and collect the routing
information. A hybrid method to support an adaptive
multipath routing scheme under multiple QoS
constraints is introduced. The scheme operates in the
following steps. i) Clustering of nodes and then select
the QoS aware cluster heads. 2) Identify and join
multicast group members to the backbone. 3) Identify
the intermediate nodes and discover multiple paths to
satisfy the multiple constraints of a call. 4) Set up a
QoS aware path for the required multicast route. 5)
Maintain backbone and alternate paths in case of
node mobility. Extensive simulations have been
conducted to evaluate the performance of the
proposed scheme in terms of packet delivery ratio,
control overheads and node mobility. The simulation
results show that the new scheme performs better than
MAODV and ODMRP in terms of reduces the network
overhead and improves packet delivery ratio.
Keywords: MANETs, Multicasting, Clusters, End-to
End delay, Packet loss ratio.
1. Introduction
An ad hoc mobile network is a collection of
mobile nodes that are dynamically and arbitrarily
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
Associate Professor, Department of EEE,
Pondicherry Engineering College.
nalam63@yahoo.com
network, a routing protocol is used to discover routes
between nodes.
978-1-4244-6589-7/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE
The primary goal of such an ad hoc network routing
protocol is to provide an efficient route establishment
between a pair of nodes so that messages may be
delivered in a timely manner. Route construction
should be done with a minimum of overhead and
bandwidth consumption. Quality of service (QoS) is
an important consideration in networking, but it is
also a significant challenge. QoS is more difficult to
guarantee in MANETs than in other type of networks,
because the wireless bandwidth is shared among
adjacent nodes and the network topology changes as
the nodes move. This requires extensive collaboration
between the nodes, both to establish the routes and to
secure the resources necessary to provide the QoS.
With the extensive applications of MANETs in many
domains, the appropriate QoS metrics should be used,
such as bandwidth, delay, packet loss rate and cost for
multicast routing. Therefore, QoS multicasting routing
protocols face the challenge of delivering data to
destinations through multihop routes in the presence
of node movements and topology changes.
In recent developments, agent technology is making
its way as a new paradigm in the areas of artificial
intelligence and computing which facilitates
sophisticated software development with features like
flexibility, scalability, adaptability and efficiency.
Agents are the autonomous programs activated on an
agent platform of a host. The agents use their own
knowledge base to achieve the specified goals without
disturbing the activities of the host.
The mobile agents are simple packets, which move
around the network and collect useful information
such as node id, link latency, congestion level etc. as
they visit different nodes. The information carried by
the mobile agents helps multicast routing protocol to
find a route for a given destination, when no route
exists in the multicast table to the destination. By this
way, the protocol overcomes the additional delay
which would have been required, in finding a new
route to the destination and also reduces the control
traffic generated.
The QoS multicast routing discussed in this paper is
a new scheme which utilizes mobile agents for finding
multiple paths and to meet the requirement of a single
call under multiple QoS constraints. The rest of the
paper is organized as follows. Related work is
presented in the next section. In Section 3, the
proposed QoS aware multicast routing is explained in
detail. Section 4 presents the agent model. Some
simulation results are presented in section 5. The
paper concludes with section 6.
2. Related works
Multicast routing protocols in ad hoc networks must
deal with typical limitations of these networks, which
include high power consumption, low bandwidth, and
high error rates. These protocols maybe divided into
two main categories: Table and source initiated
(demand-driven). Table-driven routing protocols
attempt to maintain consistent, up-to-date routing
information from each node to every other node in the
network. It includes Destination-Sequenced Distance-
Vector Routing (DSDV) [2], Cluster head Gateway
Switch Routing (CGSR) [8], and the Wireless Routing
Protocol (WRP) [15]. A different approach from
table-driven routing is source-initiated on-demand
routing. This type of routing creates routes only when
desired by the source node. It includes Dynamic
Source Routing (DSR) [4], Ad hoc On demand
Distance Vector protocols (AODV) [3].
MAODV [6] is an on-demand routing protocol that
discovers the route only when a node has something to
send. It is a hard state protocol, i.e., if a member node
of a multicast group desires to terminate its group
membership, it must request for termination. When a
mobile node wants to join a multicast group or send a
message but does not have a route to the group, a
Route Request (RREQ) is originated. All the nodes
that are members of a multicast group together with
the nodes that are not members of the group but their
position are very critical for forwarding the multicast
information, compose the tree structure. Every
multicast group is identified by a unique address and
group sequence numbers for tracing the freshness of
the group situation. MAODV however is a hard state
protocol and uses flooding of data packets for data
discovery that affects the overall performance metrics.
ODMRP [7] is a mesh architecture protocol, i.e., it
has multiple paths from the sender to the receivers. A
node that has information to send but no route to the
destination, broadcasts a Join Query message. The
next node that receives the Join Query message
updates its routing table with the appropriate node id
(identification) from which the message was received
for the reverse path back to the sender (backward
learning). The node checks the value of the TTL (time
to live) and if the value is greater than zero, the node
rebroadcasts the Join Query message. A multicast
group member node broadcasts a Join Reply message
in response to Join Query message. A neighborhood
node that receives a Join Reply consults the join reply
table to see if its node id is the same with any next hop
node id. If it is the same, then the node understands
that it is on the path to the source and sets the
forwarding group flag. However, to counter for the
link failures, ODMRP maintains more than one path
increasing the complexity of the routing process.
A Framework for QoS Multicast (FQM) to support
QoS multicast applications for MANETS that is able
to support QoS enabled applications is proposed.
Aggregated QoS multicast (AQoSM) [5] to provide
scalable and efficient QoS multicast in Diff-Serv
network is also proposed. The key idea of AQoSM is
to separate the concept of groups from the concept of
distribution tree by mapping many groups to one
distribution tree, so that multicast groups can be
routed and rerouted very quickly by assigning different
labels to the packets.
ABMRS [11] introduces the agent technology for
multicast route discovery. This hybrid protocol works
with static and mobile agents that are integrated with
existing on-demand multicast routing protocols such
as multicast ad hoc on-demand distance vector
(MAODV) routing protocol, on-demand multicast
routing protocol (ODMRP) routing protocol and
others. Here, the mobile agents move around the
network and collect the routing information. This
routing information assists the on-demand multicast
routing protocols in discovering the route. But, the
system still suffers in case of random failures of links
and nodes, excessive control overheads and absence of
a methodology for multi-group transmissions. Also,
flooding of agents in all direction, absence of cluster
management provides room for enhancement of the
protocol.
It is observed from the literature that still multicast
routing with QoS needs much more attention so that
the routing scheme must be robust, maximize packet
delivery ratio and adapt dynamically to changes un
MANET topology and environment. This paper
proposed a QoS aware multicast routing scheme that
ensures QoS guarantees such as bandwidth
reservation, delay constraint, packet loss and
minimum cost to multicast sessions
3. Proposed work
The proposed scheme in MANETs employs a set of
static and mobile agents. The scheme assumes
availability of an agent platform at all the mobile
nodes. However, in case of agent platform
unavailability, traditional message exchange
mechanisms can be used for agent communication.
Figure 1. Architecture of the system
This scheme operates in the following sequence. (i)
Hello messages are exchanged by all the nodes in the
entire network. 2) Construct a backbone for
multicasting using agents. 3) Use of agent technology
to find the multicast tree with multiple QoS
constraints which may deal with the delay, delay-jitter,
bandwidth and packet-loss metrics. 4) Agents are
used to discover multiple feasible paths during route
discovery and select the path with minimum cost as
the primary route. 5) Due to mobility, when a link
failure occurs, the agents use the alternate routes for
data transmission. Cluster management and link
failures are handled by agents to significantly reduce
the overhead of constructing a multicast tree with
multiple QoS constraints.
3.1. Network environment
A MANET comprising of several nodes that are
distributed across a given geographical area is
considered. Multicast group members may be located
in any part of a given geographical area. Mobile nodes
may randomly move in any directions. All the nodes
maintain their QoS parameters. All the reliable nodes
support multicast operations whereas intermediate
nodes just forward packets from one node to another.
The existing zone based clustering algorithm is
used for topology construction. Cluster heads are
chosen based on Reliability Factor (RF). RF is
computed based on the availability of power,
bandwidth, memory and mobility of a node. The
reliability factor of each node is recorded and the node
which has more reliability factor is selected as cluster
head. The mobile agents resides at every cluster head
collects information from all the other cluster heads
through intermediate nodes of the multicast group if it
Figure 2. Nodes organization in the cluster
exists. This cluster head maintains the control
information between clusters and for individual nodes.
The mobile agents also monitors for a change in the
reliability factor to declare a new cluster head thus
accounting for dynamic topological changes.
3.2. QoS aware multi constrained routing
model.
The proposed multicast routing is an on-demand
routing protocol that builds disjoint multiple routes
using request/reply cycles. The network is represented
as a graph G(V,E), where ‘V’ denotes the set of nodes
and ‘E’ denotes the set of communication links
connecting the nodes. For any link eєV, the
characteristics of an edge is described by four tuples
(D, J, B, C), where D, J, B and C denote delay, delay-
jitter, bandwidth and cost respectively. Among the
delay, delay-jitter and cost are additive metrics and
bandwidth is a concave metric. For any link, let
assume that D(i,j) is a delay metric, J(i,j) is a delay-
jitter metric, B(i,j) is a bandwidth metric and C(i,j) is
a cost metric. For a path ‘p’ = (s, i, j, k …d), let
D(p) = D(s,i) + D(i,j) + . . . + D(n,d) (1)
B(p) = min {B(s,i), B(i,j), . . ., B(n,d)} (2)
J(p) = J(s,i) + J(i,j) + . . .+ J(n,d) (3)
C(p) = C(s,i) + C(i,j) + . . . + C(n,d) (4)
Where D(p) represents the accumulated value of the
Delay, B(p) represents the minimum bandwidth on the
path, J(p) represents the accumulated value of the
delay-jitter, and C(p) represents the accumulated value
of the cost.
The QoS based multicast route should satisfy the
following constraints.
D(p) ≤ Dt, , B(p) ≥ Bt , J(p) ≤ Jt , and
C(p) ≤ Ct . Where Dt, is delay constrain of a route, Bt
is the bandwidth constraint, Jt is the delay-jitter
constraint and Ct is the cost constraint of a route.
Meanwhile, the cost C (p) should be minimum.
3.3 Adaptive multi path routing mechanism.
MANETs are typically characterized by high
mobility and frequent link failures that result in low
throughput and high end-to-end delay. To reduce the
number of route discoveries due to such broken paths,
multi path routing can be utilized so that alternate
paths are available. In this approach multiple paths
are formed during the route discovery process. All the
paths are maintained by means of periodic update
packets along each path. At any point of time only the
path with minimum cost is chosen for data
transmission as primary path. When the primary path
breaks due to node movement, one of the alternate
paths can be chosen as the next primary path and data
transmission can continue without initiating another
route discovery. Here, we use the link-disjoint
approach for route discovery. In which paths are
allowed to have nodes in common, but the links still
must be unique. To discover link-disjoint paths, each
node forwards only one route request (RREQ) towards
the destination during the route discovery process.
The destination node sends a route reply to each of the
unique previous hops from which it received a route
request.
Figure 3. Finding Link Disjoint paths
In the above Fig. 3, node ‘s’ is the multicast source.
D1 and D2 are the destinations. The network’s edge
are described by four tuples (D,J,B,C) . In this
example, suppose delay constraint D=15, delay-jitter
J=30, Bandwidth constraint B=45 and Cost C = 60.
When D1 is the destination, it computes the paths
according to the multiple QoS constraints. The paths
S n1n2n3D1, Sn1n2n3n8d1
and path Sn6n7n8D1 does not satisfy the
delay constraint. The paths sn1n6n7n8d1
and sn5n6n7n8d1 satisfies the delay
constraint, delay-jitter constraint, bandwidth
constraint and cost constraints. Furthermore, the path
sn1n6n7n8d1 has minimum cost among
these paths. Therefore the primary path should be the
path sn1n6n7n8d1. When d2 is the
destination, it computes the path
sn1n6n7n8d2 which should satisfy delay,
delay-jitter, bandwidth constraints and also have
minimum cost.
3.4. Maintenance of alternate paths
When a link failure occurs due to the node mobility,
the corresponding node invalidates its routing table
entry for that destination and sends and Route Error
(RERR) message towards the source. Each node along
the active path receives route error and invalidates its
corresponding route table entry. Once the source node
receives RERR, it switches its primary path to the next
best alternate link-disjoint path. If no alternate path is
available, at the source it initiates a route discovery.
Figure 4. Finding alternate paths due to node
mobility
In this example (Fig. 4) when node ‘n1’ moves out
of the transmission range, the path
sn5n6n7n8d1 could be used as alternate
route to reach d1.
4. Multicast routing scheme using agents
Agents are the autonomous programs activated on
an agent platform of a host. Agents use their own
knowledgebase to achieve the specified goals without
disturbing the activities of the host. The primary goal
of an agent is to deliver information of one node to
others in the network. Here, the agents are used to find
the multicast routes and to create the backbone for
reliable multicasting. An agent consists of three
components. (a) agent identifier (b) agent program (c)
agent knowledgebase. The knowledgebase maintains
a set of network state variables such as status of the
node (cluster head, source, intermediate, others) RF
value, available power, bandwidth, number of
movements made in recent interval, delay between
adjacent nodes etc. Agents use the knowledgebase for
reading and updating.
To initiate multicasting, the mobile agent which
resides in the source node provides group ID and
distributes multicast key to all the group members.
The source node examines all the QoS metric values
of next intermediate node using the knowledgebase of
agents. If it satisfies all constraints data transmission
takes place among all multicast members. When an
intermediate node either moves out of the range or
fails, the static agent resides at the node that
monitored such a situation will find out the new
alternate path with minimum cost between the nodes.
The alternate path and its connectivity to the network
are broadcast, so that the new forwarding table is
generated at every node. The agents update their
knowledgebase with more recent values. The agent
based architectures provide flexible, adaptable and
asynchronous mechanisms for distributed network
management, and also facilitate software reuse and
maintenance
5. Simulation
The proposed scheme has been simulated in various
network scenarios using NS-2 simulator. A discrete
event simulation is done to test operation effectiveness
of the scheme. In this section we describe the
simulation model and the simulation procedure.
5.1. Simulation model
A mobile ad hoc network consisting of ‘n’ nodes is
generated by using a random placement of the nodes
and allowed for the free movement within the area of
‘l x b’m2. Each node starts from a random location
and moves in all directions. A maximum number of
movements allowed per node every period ‘per’ is
‘move_max’. The communication range for each node
is selected as ‘C_ran’. All nodes are considered to be
non-malicious and are included in the clustering
scheme. All nodes must support an agent server,
interpreter and transport mechanism. Every node has
enough memory to support the agent’s knowledge
database. Every mobile agent is only allowed three
hops from the parent node to avoid network
congestion.
5.2. Simulation Procedure
To illustrate some results of the simulation, we have
taken n = 50, l = 1000 m and b = 1000 m, per = 100 s,
move_max = 2, C_ran = 225 m. D=16, J=30, B=45,
C=60 are given as user input for various scenarios.
The proposed routing scheme is evaluated in terms of
packet delivery ratio, group reliability, control
overhead and packet delivery latency.
5.3. Analysis of results
Packet delivery ratio of the proposed multi agent
system is higher than MAODV and ODMRP (Figure.
5). As the nodes move with high speed, the packet
delivery ratio decreases since the reliable nodes may
change and cause some losses triggering
retransmissions.
 Figure 5. Packet delivery ratio vs. mobility
Control overheads are reduced than MAODV and
ODMRP. (Figure 6). This is due to the fact that
flooding of agents in all directions is avoided as the
cluster management is employed.
Figure 6. Control overhead vs. Group size
Packet delivery latency is significantly less than
MAODV and ODMRP (Figure. 7) even at higher node
mobility for constant group size. This is due to the fact
that the regular maintenance of the paths leads to an
increased availability of valid alternate paths when the
primary path breaks.
Figure 7. Packet delivery latency vs. mobility
Packet delivery ratio decreases with increase in
group size (Figure. 8) for fixed mobility value (5 m/s).
Packet delivery ratio with varying group sizes is
higher than that of MAODV and ODMRP. This is
because of computing and caching multiple paths
during a single route discovery process.
Figure 8. Packet delivery ratio vs. group size
On the whole, the performance metrics in terms of
QoS parameters such as packet delivery ratio, end to
end latency and control overheads are improved when
compared to the existing systems such as MAODV
and ODMRP.
6. Conclusions
This paper proposes a multi path multicast routing
algorithm with multiple constraints based on mobile
agents. It effectively routes data packets to group
members even in case of high mobility and frequent
link failures. It has higher packet delivery ratio as
compared to MAODV and ODMRP and reduces the
network delay and the overhead of control messages
for routing. This work can further be extended to
include the mobile prediction scheme for multiple
multicast trees.
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