With the current trend toward ubiquitous computing come wireless devices capable of forming the nodes of mobile ad hoc networks. Such networks typically rely on routing protocols in order to communicate messages from a source node to a destination node through a set of intermediary nodes. In a typical ad hoc environment, mobile nodes mostly work as a group and are involved in collaborative computing. Multicast communication is more effective in these scenarios. This paper presents the comparison of the performance of two zone-based multicast routing protocols. Shared-tree MZR is a shared tree variant of the Multicast Routing Protocol based on Zone Routing (MZR). We compare the two variants and analyze their performance under various network conditions. The test results show that Shared-tree MZR protocol performs well and has significantly low overhead in scenarios with multiple sources. ©2003 IEEE.