DREAM : Density Aware Overlay Multicast Forwarding in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Instead of multicast functionality on a network entity, the overlay multicast schemes support multicast service with help of underlying unicast routing protocol. However, due to a node's free migration and communication based on broadcasting capability, effectiveness of overlay multicast scheme is not guaranteed in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET). Specially, nodes' density within some areas changes frequently so heterogeneous forwarding scheme based on density is strongly desired in order to reduce a number of collisions as well as enhance resource utilization. To achieve this, in this paper, we introduce a new forwarding scheme, called as DREAM (Density aware overlay Multicast forwarding). A key feature of DREAM is to introduce a scoped flooding where the nodes densely locates, on the other hand, data forwarding based on unicast routing protocol is maintained in sparse environment. Distinct advantages are evaluated by simulation. Ki-Il Kim received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Korea, in 2002 and 2005, respectively. He is currently with Department of Information Science, Gyeongsang National University as a faculty member. His research interests include routing for MANET, QoS in wireless network, multicast, and sensor networks. Sang-Ha Kim received the B.S. degree in chemistry from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, in 1980. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in quantum scattering and computer science from the University of Houston, Houston, TX, in 1984 and 1989, respectively. From 1990 to 1991, he was with the Supercomputing Center, SERI, Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) as Senior Researcher. He joined Chungnam National University, Daejeon,Korea, in 1992, where he is a Professor. His current research interests include wireless networks, ad hoc networks, QoS, optical networks, and network analysis.     

Dynamic Host-Group/Multi-Destination Routing for Multicast Sessions

Multicast routing research efforts have mostly focused on supporting the host-group model in which multicast packets are addressed to a host (or multicast) group. Another multicast routing approach uses multi-destination addressing, where a multicast packet carries a list of the unique (unicast) addresses of all the group members. This form of routing can be accomplished using limited or no additional state beyond the existing unicast routing tables. It, therefore, scales well with the number of multicast sessions but does not scale well with the size of the multicast group and, in fact, requires the size of the multicast group to be below a certain threshold. In this paper, we envision a future scenario in which both host-group and multi-destination addressing routing approaches coexist within the Internet. We develop a dynamic routing context for this future scenario wherein a multicast session can adapt among different routing configurations depending on the number of multicast group members and how this number changes over time. We consider three routing options: (1) A single multi-destination addressed flow – suitable for small-group sessions, (2) multiple multi-destination addressed flows – suitable for medium-group sessions and (3) a single host-group addressed flow – suitable for large-group sessions. For multicast sessions that vary in group membership over time, different routing protocols may be best at different points in time. Our work is concerned with the development and evaluation of protocols that allow a multicast session to dynamically switch among these three routing options as the size of the session changes.     

The PIM architecture for wide-area multicast routing

The purpose of multicast routing is to reduce the communication costs for applications that send the same data to multiple recipients. Existing multicast routing mechanisms were intended for use within regions where a group is widely represented or bandwidth is universally plentiful. When group members, and senders to those group members, are distributed sparsely across a wide area, these schemes are not efficient; data packets or membership report information are occasionally sent over many links that do not lead to receivers or senders, respectively. We have developed a multicast routing architecture that efficiently establishes distribution trees across wide area internets, where many groups will be sparsely represented. Efficiency is measured in terms of the router state, control message processing, and data packet processing, required across the entire network in order to deliver data packets to the members of the group. Our protocol independent multicast (PIM) architecture: (a) maintains the traditional IP multicast service model of receiver-initiated membership, (b) supports both shared and source-specific (shortest-path) distribution trees, (c) is not dependent on a specific unicast routing protocol, and (d) uses soft-state mechanisms to adapt to underlying network conditions and group dynamics. The robustness, flexibility, and scaling properties of this architecture make it well-suited to large heterogeneous internetworks     

A protocol for scalable loop-free multicast routing

In network multimedia applications such as multiparty teleconferencing, users often need to send the same information to several (but not necessarily all) other users. To manage such one-to-many or many-to-many communication efficiently in wide-area internetworks, it is imperative to support and perform multicast routing. Multicast routing sends a single copy of a message from a source to multiple receivers over a communication link that is shared by the paths to the receivers. Loop-freedom is an especially important consideration in multicasting because applications using multicasting tend to be multimedia and bandwidth intensive, and loops in multicast routing duplicate looping packets. We present and verify a new multicast routing protocol, called multicast Internet protocol (MIP), which offers a simple and flexible approach to constructing both group-shared and shortest-paths multicast trees. MIP can be sender-initiated or receiver-initiated or both; therefore, it can be tailored to the particular nature of an application's group dynamics and size. MIP is independent of the underlying unicast routing algorithms used. MIP is robust and adapts under dynamic network conditions (topology or link cost changes) to maintain loop-free multicast routing. Under stable network conditions, MIP has no maintenance or control message overhead. We prove that MIP is loop-free at every instant, and that it is deadlock-free and obtains multicast routing trees within a finite time after the occurrence of an arbitrary sequence of topology or unicast changes     

High-throughput multicast routing metrics in wireless mesh networks

The stationary nature of nodes in a mesh network has shifted the main design goal of routing protocols from maintaining connectivity between source and destination nodes to finding high-throughput paths between them. Numerous link-quality-based routing metrics have been proposed for choosing high-throughput routing paths in recent years. In this paper, we study routing metrics for high-throughput tree or mesh construction in multicast protocols. We show that there is a fundamental difference between unicast and multicast routing in how data packets are transmitted at the link layer, and accordingly how the routing metrics for unicast routing should be adapted for high-throughput multicast routing. We propose a low-overhead adaptive online algorithm to incorporate link-quality metrics to a representative multicast routing protocol. We then study the performance improvement achieved by using different link-quality-based routing metrics via extensive simulation and experiments on a mesh-network testbed, using ODMRP as a representative multicast protocol.Our extensive simulation studies show that: (1) ODMRP equipped with any of the link-quality-based routing metrics can achieve higher throughput than the original ODMRP. In particular, under a tree topology, on average, ODMRP enhanced with link-quality routing metrics achieve up to 34% higher throughput than the original ODMRP under low multicast sending rate; (2) the improvement reduces to 21% under high multicast sending rate due to higher interference experienced by the data packets from the probe packets; (3) heavily penalizing lossy links is an effective way in the link-quality metric design to avoid low-throughput paths; and (4) the path redundancy from a mesh data dissemination topology in mesh-based multicast protocols provides another degree of robustness to link characteristics and reduces the additional throughput gain achieved by using link-quality-based routing metrics. Finally, our experiments on an eight-node testbed show that on average, ODMRP using SPP and PP achieves 14% and 17% higher throughput over ODMRP, respectively, validating the simulation results.     

The core-assisted mesh protocol

The core-assisted mesh protocol (CAMP) is introduced for multicast routing in ad hoc networks. CAMP generalizes the notion of core-based trees introduced for internet multicasting into multicast meshes that have much richer connectivity than trees. A shared multicast mesh is defined for each multicast group; the main goal of using such meshes is to maintain the connectivity of multicast groups even while network routers move frequently, CAMP consists of the maintenance of multicast meshes and loop-free packet forwarding over such meshes. Within the multicast mesh of a group, packets from any source in the group are forwarded along the reverse shortest path to the source, just as in traditional multicast protocols based on source-based trees. CAMP guarantees that within a finite time, every receiver of a multicast group has a reverse shortest path to each source of the multicast group. Multicast packets for a group are forwarded along the shortest paths front sources to receivers defined within the group's mesh. CAMP uses cores only to limit the traffic needed for a router to join a multicast group; the failure of cores does not stop packet forwarding or the process of maintaining the multicast meshes     

Bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees in large-scale ad-hoc networks

The purpose of this paper is to construct bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees for QoS applications in large-scale ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Recent routing protocols and multicast protocols in large-scale MANETs adopt two-tier infrastructures to avoid the inefficiency of the flooding. Hosts with a maximal number of neighbors are often chosen as backbone hosts (BHs) to forward packets. Most likely, these BHs will be traffic concentrations/bottlenecks of the network. In addition, since host mobility is not taken into consideration in BH selection, these two-tier schemes will suffer from more lost packets if highly mobile hosts are selected as BHs. In this paper, a new multicast protocol is proposed for partitioning large-scale MANET into two-tier infrastructures. In the proposed two-tier multicast protocol, hosts with fewer hops and longer remaining connection time to the other hosts will be selected as BHs. The objective is not only to obtain short and stable multicast routes, but also to construct a stable two-tier infrastructure with fewer lost packets. Further, previous MANET quality-of-service (QoS) routing/multicasting protocols determined bandwidth-satisfied routes for QoS applications. Some are implemented as a probing scheme, but the scheme is inefficient due to high overhead and slow response. On the contrary, the others are implemented by taking advantage of routing and link information to reduce the inefficiency. However, the latter scheme suffers from two bandwidth-violation problems. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to avoid the two problems, and it is integrated with the proposed two-tier multicast protocol to construct bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees for QoS applications in large-scale MANETs. The proposed algorithm aims to achieve better network performance by minimizing the number of forwarders in a tree.     

Tree-shared multicast in optical burst-switched WDM networks

In this paper, we propose a new multicast scheme called tree-shared multicasting (TS-MCAST) in optical burst-switched wavelength-division-multiplexing networks, taking into consideration overheads due to control packets and guard bands (GBs) associated with data bursts. In TS-MCAST, multicast traffic belonging to multiple multicast sessions from the same source-edge node to possibly different destination-edge nodes can be multiplexed together in a data burst, which is delivered via a shared multicast tree. To support TS-MCAST, we propose three tree-sharing strategies based on equal coverage, super coverage, and overlapping coverage, and present a simple shared multicast tree-construction algorithm. For performance comparison, we consider two other multicast schemes: separate multicasting (S-MCAST) and multiple unicasting (M-UCAST). We show that TS-MCAST outperforms S-MCAST and M-UCAST in terms of bandwidth consumed and processing load (i.e., number of control packets) incurred for a given amount of multicast traffic under the same unicast traffic load with static multicast sessions and membership.     

A survey of data multicast techniques, architectures, andalgorithms

This article presents a survey of architectures, techniques, and algorithms for multicasting data in communication switching networks. We start with a broadcast architecture using a separate copy network and a routing network. A few versions of this idea using Delta and Benes networks exist. Another multicast architecture is a recycling network where internal nodes act as relay points, accept packets from the switching fabric, and recycle them back into the fabric after relabeling the packets. Next, we give an overview of a system that uses the Boolean splitting multicast algorithm. In this system a nonblocking self routing broadcast banyan copy network has been proposed. The network consists of several components including a running adder network to generate running sums of copy numbers specified in the headers of input packets. We then describe a multicasting technique presented for a different class of switching networks called deflection-routing networks. Finally, the idea of extending a nonblocking network to a three-dimensional structure consisting of multiple parallel planes is also presented. At the end of this article, we compare the efficiencies of the presented multicast architectures     

Scalable Multicasting: The Core-Assisted Mesh Protocol

Most of the multicast routing protocols for ad hoc networks today are based on shared or source-based trees; however, keeping a routing tree connected for the purpose of data forwarding may lead to a substantial network overhead. A different approach to multicast routing consists of building a shared mesh for each multicast group. In multicast meshes, data packets can be accepted from any router, as opposed to trees where data packets are only accepted from routers with whom a tree branch has been established. The difference among multicast routing protocols based on meshes is in the method used to build these structures. Some mesh-based protocols require the flooding of sender or receiver announcements over the whole network. This paper presents the Core-Assisted Mesh Protocol, which uses meshes for data forwarding, and avoids flooding by generalizing the notion of core-based trees introduced for internet multicasting. Group members form the mesh of a group by sending join requests to a set of cores. Simulation experiments show that meshes can be used effectively as multicast routing structures without the need for flooding control packets.     

The arrayed-waveguide grating-based single-hop WDM network: an architecture for efficient multicasting

Research on multicasting in single-hop wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) networks has so far focused on networks based on the passive star coupler (PSC), a broadcast device. It has been shown that multicasting performance is improved by partitioning multicast transmissions into multiple multicast copies. However, the channel bottleneck of the PSC, which does not allow for spatial wavelength reuse, restricts the multicast performance. We investigate multicasting in a single-hop WDM network that is based on an arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG), a wavelength routing device that allows for spatial wavelength reuse. In our network, optical multicasting is enabled by wavelength-insensitive splitters that are attached to the AWG output ports. Multicasts are partitioned among the splitters and each multicast copy is routed to a different splitter by sending it on a different wavelength. We demonstrate that the spatial wavelength reuse in our network significantly improves the throughput-delay performance for multicast traffic. By means of analysis and simulations, we also demonstrate that, for a typical mix of unicast and multicast traffic, the throughput-delay performance is dramatically increased by transmitting multicast packets concurrently with control information in the reservation medium access control protocol of our AWG-based network.     

XORs in the Air: Practical Wireless Network Coding

This paper proposes COPE, a new architecture for wireless mesh networks. In addition to forwarding packets, routers mix (i.e., code) packets from different sources to increase the information content of each transmission. We show that intelligently mixing packets increases network throughput. Our design is rooted in the theory of network coding. Prior work on network coding is mainly theoretical and focuses on multicast traffic. This paper aims to bridge theory with practice; it addresses the common case of unicast traffic, dynamic and potentially bursty flows, and practical issues facing the integration of network coding in the current network stack. We evaluate our design on a 20-node wireless network, and discuss the results of the first testbed deployment of wireless network coding. The results show that using COPE at the forwarding layer, without modifying routing and higher layers, increases network throughput. The gains vary from a few percent to several folds depending on the traffic pattern, congestion level, and transport protocol.      

Dynamic group multicast routing with bandwidth reservations

Multicasting refers to the transmission of data from a source node to multiple destination nodes in a network. Group multicasting is a generalization of multicasting whereby every member of a group is allowed to multicast messages to other members that belong to the same group. The routing problem in this case involves the construction of a set of low cost multicast trees with bandwidth requirements, one for each member of the group for multicasting messages to other members of the group. In this paper, we examine this routing problem with an additional requirement that member nodes are allowed to join and leave the multicasting group anytime during a session. We call this problem, the dynamic group multicast routing problem (DGMRP). In this paper, we proposed three heuristic algorithms to generate a set of low cost multicast trees with dynamic group membership. Results from our empirical study shows that the one of the proposed algorithms, called Maximum bandwidth bottleneck path selection algorithm (MBBPS), achieves better utilization of bandwidth resources as compared with the other two algorithms which are based on a greedy approach. In addition MBBPS performs better in terms of cost when the bandwidth is not sufficient in the network. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The design, implementation, and performance evaluation of theon-demand multicast routing protocol in multihop wireless networks

Multicasting has emerged as one of the most focused areas in the field of networking. As the technology and popularity of the Internet grow, applications such as video conferencing that require the multicast feature are becoming more widespread. Another interesting development has been the emergence of dynamically reconfigurable wireless ad hoc networks to interconnect mobile users for applications ranging from disaster recovery to distributed collaborative computing. In this article we describe the on-demand multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. ODMRP is a mesh-based, rather than conventional tree-based, multicast scheme and uses a forwarding group concept (only a subset of nodes forwards the multicast packets packets via scoped flooding). It applies on-demand procedures to dynamically build routes and maintain multicast group membership. We also describe our implementation of the protocol in a real laptop testbed     

Hierarchical multicast techniques and scalability in mobile Ad Hoc networks

Many potential applications of Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) involve group communications among the nodes. Multicasting is an useful operation that facilitates group communications. Efficient and scalable multicast routing in MANETs is a difficult issue. In addition to the conventional multicast routing algorithms, recent protocols have adopted the following new approaches: overlays, backbone-based, and stateless. In this paper, we study these approaches from the protocol state management point of view, and compare their scalability behaviors.To enhance performance and enable scalability, we have proposed a framework for hierarchical multicasting in MANET environments. Two classes of hierarchical multicasting approaches, termed as domain-based and overlay-driven, are proposed. We have considered a variety of approaches that are suitable for different scenarios such as multicast group sizes and number of groups. Results obtained through simulations demonstrate enhanced performance and scalability of the proposed techniques.     

A Power-Aware Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks With Mobility Prediction

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a dynamically reconfigurable wireless network that does not have a fixed infrastructure. Due to the high mobility of nodes, the network topology of MANETs changes very fast, making it more difficult to find the routes that message packets use. Because mobile nodes have limited battery power, it is therefore very important to use energy in a MANET efficiently. In this paper, we propose a power-aware multicast routing protocol (PMRP) with mobility prediction for MANETs. In order to select a subset of paths that provide increased stability and reliability of routes, in routing discovery, each node receives the RREQ packet and uses the power-aware metric to get in advance the power consumption of transmitted data packets. If the node has enough remaining power to transmit data packets, it uses the global positioning system (GPS) to get the location information (i.e., position, velocity and direction) of the mobile nodes and utilizes this information to calculate the link expiration time (LET) between two connected mobile nodes. During route discovery, each destination node selects the routing path with the smallest LET and uses this smallest link expiration time as the route expiration time (RET). Each destination node collects several feasible routes and then selects the path with the longest RET value as the primary routing path. Then the source node uses these routes between the source node and each destination node to create a multicast tree. In the multicast tree, the source node will be the root node and the destination nodes will be the leaf nodes. Simulation results show that the proposed PMRP outperforms MAODV (Royer, E. M. & Perkins, C. E. (1999). In Proceedings of the ACM MOBICOM, pp. 207–218, August 1999.) and RMAODV (Baolin, S. & Layuan, L. (2005). In Proceeding of the 2005 IEEE International symposium on microwave antenna, propagation and EMC technologies for wireless communications, Vol. 2, pp. 1514–1517, August 2005.).     

基于泛洪约束的MANET按需组播路由协议

降低路由控制开销是MANET网络组播路由协议节省节点能量,提高带宽利用率的关键因素之一。本文研究了组播路径近邻节点对路由维护的作用以及链路的连通性,分别提出了一个新的泛k-洪约束算法和一个混合泛洪模式。基于泛k-洪约束算法和混合泛洪模式,提出一个新的按需组播路由协议ODMRP-CF,ODMRP-CF协议通过选择k-路由近邻节点转发泛洪分组来提高泛洪效率。ODMRP-CF协议不仅保持了ODMRP协议所具有的简单,对节点移动鲁棒性好的优点,而且有效地降低了ODMRP-CF协议的控制开销。     

Wireless Ad Hoc Multicast Routing with Mobility Prediction

An ad hoc wireless network is an infrastructureless network composed of mobile hosts. The primary concerns in ad hoc networks are bandwidth limitations and unpredictable topology changes. Thus, efficient utilization of routing packets and immediate recovery of route breaks are critical in routing and multicasting protocols. A multicast scheme, On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP), has been recently proposed for mobile ad hoc networks. ODMRP is a reactive (on-demand) protocol that delivers packets to destination(s) on a mesh topology using scoped flooding of data. We can apply a number of enhancements to improve the performance of ODMRP. In this paper, we propose a mobility prediction scheme to help select stable routes and to perform rerouting in anticipation of topology changes. We also introduce techniques to improve transmission reliability and eliminate route acquisition latency. The impact of our improvements is evaluated via simulation.     

An efficient mesh‐based multicast routing protocol in mobile ad hoc networks

Mesh‐based multicast routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) build multiple paths from senders to receivers to deliver packets even in the presence of links breaking. This redundancy results in high reliability/robustness but may significantly increase packet overhead. This paper proposes a mesh‐based multicast protocol, called centered protocol for unified multicasting through announcements (CPUMA), that achieves comparable reliability as existing mesh‐based multicast protocols, however, with significantly much less data overhead. In CPUMA, a distributed core‐selection and maintenance algorithm is used to find the source‐centric center of a shared mesh. We leverage data packets to center the core of each multicast group shared mesh instead of using GPS or any pre‐assignment of cores to groups (the case of existing protocols). The proposed centering scheme allows reducing data packet overhead and creating forwarding paths toward the nearest mesh member instead of the core to reduce latency. We show, via simulations, that CPUMA outperforms existing multicast protocols in terms of data packet overhead, and latency while maintaining a constant or better packet delivery ratio, at the cost of a small increase in control overhead in a few scenarios. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Domain Constrained Multicast: A New Approach for IP Multicast Routing

One of major reasons why IP multicast has not been well deployed is the complexity of IP multicast routing. Since existing IP multicast routing protocols have been designed independently of IP unicast routing protocols, a router must maintain routing tables for both IP mutlicast and unicast routing. This is, in particular, a big burden for an inter-domain router. In addition, by using existing IP multicast routing protocols, we cannot realize an application that a sending host outside the designated domain sends IP multicast packets only towards the designated domain. To resolve above issues, we propose a new architecture for IP multicast, which is called Domain Constrained Multicast (DCM). In this architecture, IP multicast packets are forwarded to a border router of the designated domain using IP unicast routing. And then, IP multicast packets are delivered inside the designated domain using IP multicast. We propose an address format when realizing the DCM architecture using IPv6. We describe the extension of the DCM architecture for applying it to inter-domain IP multicast routing. Finally, we have compared the DCM architecture for inter-domain routing, with existing inter-domain IP multicast routing protocols such as MSDP and BGMP.