Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a free flowing network. There is no central control. Each node acts as a router. The routing protocols for this type of network needs lot of consideration because of the changing topology, limited bandwidth and energy. For multicast routing, mesh-based protocols are more robust against the topology changes than the tree based routing protocols. The mesh-based multicast routing protocol, ODMRP (On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol) and the tree-based routing

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... col, MAODV (Multicast Ad-hoc On-Demand Distance Vector) are considered for the comparison. To analyze the performance level of the mesh-based protocol against the tree-based protocol with the performance metrics such as throughput, routing overhead, transmission overhead, packet delivery ratio, dropping of packets and average end-to-end delay under a various number of nodes using NS2.To compare the performance metrics of two protocols, the number of nodes in the network is gradually increased from 10 to 110. The analysis of performance shows that the tree-based multicast routing protocol has higher packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay than the mesh-based routing protocol. Index Terms-MANET, Multicast routing, MAODV, ODMRP and Overhead.