Ad hoc networks are peer to peer, autonomous networks comprised of wireless mobile devices. The ease and speed of deployment of these networks makes them ideal for battlefield communications, disaster recovery and other such applications where fixed infrastructure is not readily available. Limited bandwidth, energy constraints and unpredictable network topologies pose difficult problems for the design of applications for these networks. The last couple of years has seen renewed research in this field. Specifically in unicast and multicast routing and security issues.

In this thesis, we address the multicast routing problem for ad hoc networks. We present a novel multicast routing protocol called the source grouped flooding protocol. The protocol creates multicast routes between the source and group members based on hop count distance constraints. We also propose a probabilistic data forwarding mechanism to achieve efficient data dissemination. We present simulation results that capture the performance of our protocol against parameters that characterize an ad hoc network. We find that the protocol is robust against topology changes and achieves efficient data distribution.