Multicast is the transmission of datagrams to a group of
zero or more hosts identified by a single destination group address. It
provides a simple yet robust and efficient communication mechanism. Various
categories of multicast routing protocols have been developed
to perform the fixed wireline network multicasting and the wireless mobile ad
hoc network multicasting separately. But less work has
been done for the multicast routing between these two networks except for some
work done with mobile IP for multicasting in fixed infrastructure cellular
network, which consists of stationary base stations and one hop mobile
endpoints. In this thesis, a multicast gateway (MGW) is
designed and implemented to solve the challenge of multicast routing in the
mixed network that consists of a fixed subnet and a wireless mobile multi-hop
ad hoc subnet. Simulations were conducted on the
network simulator ns-2 to evaluate the performance of data delivery ratio and
control overhead of protocol combinations of four fixed multicast protocols (in
PIM-Sparse Mode or in PIM-Dense Mode) and two mobile ad hoc multicast
protocols, i.e., Multicast Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (MAODV) and
On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP), with the functionality of MGW by
varying the sender and receiver numbers as well as scaling the subnet size.
Our pioneer work of MGW has fulfilled the multicast data transmission for this
mixed network. It also provides a model for the future study in this area.