  Multicasting is effective when its group members are sparse and the speed is
low. On the other hand, broadcasting is effective when the group members dense
and the speed are high. Since mobile ad hoc networks are highly dynamic in
nature, either of the above two strategies can be adopted at different
scenarios. In this paper, we propose an ant agent based adaptive, multicast
protocol that exploits group members desire to simplify multicast routing and
invoke broadcast operations in appropriate localized regimes. By reducing the
number of group members that participate in the construction of the multicast
structure and by providing robustness to mobility by performing broadcasts in
densely clustered local regions, the proposed protocol achieves packet delivery
statistics that are comparable to that with a pure multicast protocol but with
significantly lower overheads. By our simulation results, we show that our
proposed protocol achieves increased Packet Delivery Fraction (PDF) with
reduced overhead and routing load.
