The advent of ubiquitous computing and the proliferation of
portable computing devices have raised the importance of mobile and wireless networking.
A major challenge lies in adapting multicast communication to environments
where mobility is unlimited and outages/failures are frequent. This thesis
investigates the performance of two prominent on demand multicast routing
protocols aimed specifically at fully Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) -
Multicast Ad hoc On-Demand Vector protocol (MAODV) and On-Demand Multicast
Routing Protocol (ODMRP). We demonstrate that even though MAODV and ODMRP share
similar on-demand behaviour, the differences in protocol mechanics can lead to
performance differentials. Based on the observations, we make recommendations
about how the performance of either protocol as well as future implementations can be improved.