Prioritized Overlay Multicast in Mobile Ad Hoc Environments

Many proposed routing protocols for manets require nodes to maintain and update complicated route information, which incurs significant overhead when groups have different priorities. To address this problem, some researchers have begun focusing on application-layer, or overlay, multicast in which an overlay network forms a virtual network consisting of only member nodes atop the physical infrastructure. The authors propose a prototype of prioritized overlay multicast for manets in which participating nodes can carry out multiple functions and thus be associated with more than one overlay tree.