Many applications of mobile ad-hoc networks like conferencing, handling emergency situations, military operations require the multicast routing. Moreover, in such applications there is a demand for multimedia traffic such as audio/video calls or audio/video conferencing. For mobile ad-hoc environments, it is accepted that the on-demand reactive routing protocol AODV has become default. Moreover, to get the benefits of using a single protocol for both unicast and multicast routing, in this work, the multicast routing protocol MAODV (multicast extension of AODV) has been considered and its performance is observed for CBR, VoIP and video data traffics. Since to accommodate multimedia traffic, a routing protocol demands for stringent QoS requirements in terms of delay, jitter and packet losses; the performance of the protocol is measured in terms of QoS performance metrics such as average delay, average jitter and packet delivery ratio. Further, a modified version of MAODV (called M-MAODV) is taken and its performance is also evaluated for multimedia traffic. A fair comparison of MAODV and M-MAODV protocols is achieved through the use of same network conditions for the evaluation. From the results, the improved values of delay, jitter and packet delivery ratio have been observed for M-MAODV irrespective of node speeds and for all data traffic types.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) have become the prominent set of wireless ad hoc networks with their distinctive characteristics, and ranging several fields of applications. In these networks, the nodes are mobile devices, changing their positions with time, resulting in dynamic topologies of the network. These dynamic environments make the routing of data packets from the source to the destination through multi hoping a difficult task. With the growing popularity of sophisticated mobile devices, the demand for multimedia traffic in such networks is also increasing. Henceforth, to ensure the quality of service (QoS) for multimedia traffic over MANETs has turn into further challenging. This paper focuses on the assessment of built-in QoS support of Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV), and its multicast extension MAODV for multimedia traffic (a combination of audio and video) over the mobile ad hoc environment. The work is carried out to measure the achievable QoS metrics like packet delivery ratio, latency, and jitter.