Abstract:In Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET), it is one of the dominant factors saving a node’s battery power and improving the efficiency of network bandwidth to reduce the routing overhead for a multicast routing protocol. The roles of some nodes near the paths in the maintenance of multicasting paths and the link connectivity are studied, a local flooding algorithm, namely k-constrained flooding algorithm, and a mixed flooding pattern are presented, and then a new multicast routing protocol, which is called the On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol with Constrained Flooding (ODMRP-CF), is also proposed in this paper. In ODMRP-CF, only k-nodes near the paths can be selected to forward the control packets to enhance the flooding efficiency. Simulation results show that the ODMRP-CF can reduce significantly control overhead while keeping similar packet delivery ratio to ODMRP.