Due to the characteristics of mobile host and wireless network, multicast in wireless environment has many different aspect from that in wired one. First, the receiver can lose a message or get the same message in more than two locations because of the host mobility. Second, mobile host and wireless network have limitations on power consumption, computation, memory, and bandwidth. Thus, we have to minimize the cost of mobile host and wireless network. A target application of mobile multicast is the information dissemination. For example, the server provides mobile hosts like pager or cellular phone with information such as stock price, exchange rate, news, weather forecast and traffic. Such applications benefit from FIFO and reliable message delivery. The sender-initiated multicast is suited for this kind of application. In sender-initiated multicast protocol, the sender manages the group of receivers.
We propose a new sender-initiated reliable multicast protocol for wireless environment. Compared to the previous protocols that are designed for small networks, the proposed protocol is more scalable.
