Abstract  There  are  two  types  of  wireless  networks,  infrastru cture  wireless  network  and  wireless  Ad-hoc  networks .  Wireless  Ad-hoc  networks  are  well  suited  for  use  by  emergenc y  response  teams,  for  search  and  rescue  operations that  require  team- based communications in the absence of working tele communications infrastructure, while infrastructure networks require the  existence of access point in which all the communic ations are done through it. Unfortunately, wireless Ad-hoc networks suffer  from limited bandwidth and QoS constraints. A Prior ity eXplicit multiCAST based routing protocol (P-XCAST) is presented in  this paper to support team-based many-to-many commu nications in wireless Ad-hoc networks. eXplicit multiCAST (XCAST) is  well suited for supporting a large number of small  groups effectively, in comparison with multicast based protocols. However,  since XCAST was initially designed for wired networ ks, it was not optimized for wireless Ad-hoc network use. The proposed P- XCAST  protocol  enhances  XCAST  for  wireless  Ad-hoc  n etwork  use  by  modifying  the  route  request  mechanism  in  AODV  to  build  the  network  topology, and  route  data packets  containing  the  list  of destinations  for a  given  group  in  the  XCAST header,  by  classifying  the  destinations  according  to  simila rities  in  their  next  hop  neighbors  and  hop  counts.  A  single  data  packet  is  XCAST  in  lieu  of  sending  n  unicast  data  packets  to  n  destinations  with  the  same  next  hop  neighbor.  In addition,  P-XCAST  is  merged  with  a  new  mobile  group  management  protocol  to  handle  mobility  of  group  members.  In  this  paper,  P-XCAST  was  tested using topologies with different sources that  were sending and receiving data at the same time t o handle foreground and  background  many-to-many  applications.  The  results  o f  simulation  experiments  show  that  P-XCAST  achieved   better  QoS  performance  compared  with  other  routing  protocols  f or  small  group  sizes  typical  of  group  communications  applications  such  as Push-To-Talk (PTT).   

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[18] Zhang Y. and Aaron G., Quality of Service for Ad-hoc on-Demand Distance Vector Routing, in Proceedings of IEEE Wireless and Mobile Computing, pp. 192-196, 2005. Faisal Alzyoud received his PhD with honority in computer networks from Universiti Sains Malaysia in 2011; the thesis title is XCAST based routing protocol for push-to- talk applications in MANETs. He received his BSc from Jordan University in engineering and MSc in information systems from The Arab Academy for Banking and Financial Sciences, Jordan in 2004. His research interests are in the field of wireless networks, Ad -hoc networks, multicast and multicast for small group, QoS and real time applications. Tat-Chee Wan received his BSEE and MSEE/CE from Univerisity of Miami, Florida, USA, and his PhD in computer science from Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia. He currently serves as a program chairman in the School of Computer Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia. He wa s formerly with Motorola Malaysia Sdn. Bhd. as a seni or R&D engineer in software development for two-way radios. His current research interests include QoS mechanisms for wireless networks, satellite-based internet, and real time embedded systems. This research is conducted in affiliation with the Natio nal Advanced IPv6 Centre (NAV6) in USM. He is presently involved in the AI 3

[ Ay-triple-Ei ] Asian Internet Interconnections Initiative Project as the Terrestrial Wireless (TerWi) Working Group chair, t o investigate the interoperability of unidirectional links over satellite with terrestrial wireless networks f or supporting interactive multimedia communications over IPv6 networks.