Stateless Multicast Protocol for Ad Hoc Networks

Multicast routing protocols typically rely on the a priori creation of a multicast tree (or mesh), which requires the individual nodes to maintain state information. In dynamic networks with bursty traffic, where long periods of silence are expected between the bursts of data, this multicast state maintenance adds a large amount of communication, processing, and memory overhead for no benefit to the application. Thus, we have developed a stateless receiver-based multicast (RBMulticast) protocol that simply uses a list of the multicast members' (e.g., sinks') addresses, embedded in packet headers, to enable receivers to decide the best way to forward the multicast traffic. This protocol, called Receiver-Based Multicast, exploits the knowledge of the geographic locations of the nodes to remove the need for costly state maintenance (e.g., tree/mesh/neighbor table maintenance), making it ideally suited for multicasting in dynamic networks. RBMulticast was implemented in the OPNET simulator and tested using a sensor network implementation. Both simulation and experimental results confirm that RBMulticast provides high success rates and low delay without the burden of state maintenance.