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The chapter describes an architecture to relay on demand a real-time IP multicast audio-video stream broadcasted by a satellite on a terrestrial link. The stream is received by suitably equipped sites and then relayed to other sites that are not equipped with satellite receiving hardware but are nonetheless willing to receive the stream. By exploiting the properties of satellite transmission and adopting a hybrid satellite/terrestrial, multicast/unicast approach, the described architecture allows to overcome the restrictions suffered by multicast traffic in the global Internet, allowing it to scale easily across autonomous systems. All things considered, the proposed architecture outlines a large-scale interactive audio-video distribution system similar to those based on Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) and it compares favourably with them when performances, costs and scalability are examined.

The network-on-chip (NoC) has been introduced as an efficient communication backbone to tackle the increasing challenges of on-chip communication. Nevertheless, merely metal-based NoC implementation offers only limited performance and power scalability in terms of multicast and broadcast traffics. To meet scalability demands, this paper addresses the system-level challenges for intra-chip multicast communication in a proposed hybrid interconnects architecture. This hybrid NoC combines and utilizes both regular metal on-chip interconnects and new type of wireless-NoC (WiNoC) which is Zenneck surface wave interconnects (SWI). Moreover, this paper embeds novel multicast routing and arbitration schemes to address system-level multicast-challenges in the proposed architecture. Specifically, a design exploration of contention handling in SWI layer is considered in both centralized and decentralized manners. Consequently, the hybrid wire-SWI architecture avoids overloading the network, alleviates the formation of traffic hotspots and avoid deadlocks that are typically associated with state-of-the-art multicast handling. The evaluation is based on a cycle-accurate simulation and hardware description. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed architecture in terms of power consumption (up to around $10$ x) and performance (around $22$ x) compared to regular NoCs. These results are achieved with negligible hardware overheads. This study explore promising potential of the proposed architecture for current and future NoC-based many-core processors.

Multicasting can reduce network traffic in multiuser systems by serving multiple users simultaneously. The benefits of multicasting basically come from the overlapping and synchronism of user requests. Pushing and caching are techniques that prestore content items in buffers closer to users based on the prediction of user requests, thereby providing a promising approach to eliminating the asynchronism of user requests and creating multicasting opportunities. This paper studies a multiuser wireless communication system, in which the buffers for caching are deployed in the user terminals. Based on the request delay information (RDI) which describes when the users request content items in a deterministic or statistical way, a joint pushing and caching (JPC) method is presented to schedule the content items pushed by the base station and cached in the user buffers. In this paper, multicasting JPC systems work in two modes, without or with the feedback of RDI. Furthermore, RDI is classified into three forms, namely, noncausal, statistical, and causal. Static and dynamic JPC policies are, respectively, proposed for the two work modes. In addition, the effective throughput resulting from JPC under the three forms of RDI is demonstrated via theoretical analysis and simulation.

We design and implement a practical layered multiplexed-coded decode-forward (LMDF) relaying strategy for a wide-band wireless multicast network. The proposed LMDF scheme relies on layering at the source, with the individual layers provided unequal power allocation through a simple bit-mapping operation to quadrature amplitude modulation constellations. At the relay, LMDF utilizes a multiplexed-coded approach that, with a single transmission, caters for the disparity in the number of layers decoded at different destinations. Under a practical setup of hard-decision decoding and coding across the subcarriers of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulated transmissions, we derive the information theoretic achievable rates of LMDF and use the IEEE 802.11 TGn channel model for performance evaluations. LMDF is then implemented using convolutional codes, with the relay's code optimized specifically keeping its multiplexed nature in mind. In addition to simulations, we also evaluate the performance of LMDF through a system-level implementation by using the National Instruments USRPs 2921. We conduct over-the-air experiments in an indoor office environment using an OFDM-based physical layer, and illustrate the considerable performance benefits of LMDF over benchmarks such as conventional two-hop decode-forward.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) connect to the Internet via access gateways. This paper studies multi-source video multicast in Internet-connected WMNs. The focus is on the design of a shareable integrated multicast that allows the multicasts of video sources to employ common Internet shortcuts or WMN paths to avoid potentially high WMN overheads and excessive Internet usage. Several algorithms are described that together form a video multicast framework running a controlled number of shareable multicasts under the constraint of Internet availability. These algorithms are the resource-efficient source group algorithm, the efficient integrated architecture algorithm, and the interference-controlled multicasting tree algorithm. These algorithms represent different approaches to overcoming various costs arising from multi-source video multicast, enabling multiple video sources to distribute delay, and throughput-guaranteed videos to receivers across large-scale areas. Simulation results are presented that quantify the performance gains that can be achieved.

Multicast is an important way to diffuse data in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where nodes can receive data only in active state. The communication delay can be extremely large if inappropriate schedules are adopted. Unfortunately, most previous methods do not consider controlling multicast delay energy-efficiently. This paper studies the minimum active time slot augmentation for delay-bounded multicast (MAADM) problem in duty-cycled WSNs. The MAADM problem is proved to be NP-hard even under the node-exclusive interference model. An optimal algorithm is proposed for the MAADM problem when $K=2$ and a heuristic latency bounding algorithm is proposed for source-to-all communications, where $K$ denotes the number of the destination nodes. When $K>2$ , two ( $K$ −1)-approximation algorithms are designed for the MAADM problem. In addition, a low computation-complexity distributed algorithm is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that develops a series of efficient centralized and distributed algorithms for the MAADM problem in duty-cycled WSNs. The theoretical analysis and experimental results verify that all the proposed algorithms have high performance in terms of delivery delay and energy consumption.

The tremendous energy consumption attributed to the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field has become a persistent concern during the last few years, attracting significant academic and industrial efforts. Networks have begun to be improved towards being “green”. Considering Quality of Service (QoS) and power consumption for green Internet, a Green Intelligent flexible QoS many-to-many Multicast routing algorithm (GIQM) is presented in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, a Rendezvous Point Confirming Stage (RPCS) is first carried out to obtain a rendezvous point and the candidate Many-to-many Multicast Sharing Tree ( M 2 ST ); then an Optimal Solution Identifying Stage (OSIS) is performed to generate a modified M 2 ST rooted at the rendezvous point, and an optimal M 2 ST is obtained by comparing the original M 2 ST and the modified M 2 ST . The network topology of Cernet2, GeANT and Internet2 were considered for the simulation of GIQM. The results from a series of experiments demonstrate the good performance and outstanding power-saving potential of the proposed GIQM with QoS satisfied.

© 1967-2012 IEEE. Multicasting is emerging as an efficient method to deliver the same data to a group of users, thereby saving network resources. The fairness between different multicast groups is an important quality-of-service (QoS) indication, but it has not been given significant attention. In this paper, we propose a normalized signal-To-noise ratio (SNR)-based fair scheduling for multiple multicast groups in multicast systems. The system fairness and capacity are then analyzed and compared for both fair scheduling and greedy scheduling over independent but non-identically distributed (i.n.d.) fading channels. Closed-form expressions in terms of the system spectral efficiency, outage probability, system fairness, and average bit error rate (BER) are derived in an uncoded/coded M-Ary quadrature amplitude modulation based adaptive transmission multicast system over i.n.d. Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical results show that compared with greedy scheduling, fair scheduling achieves considerably high fairness at the cost of slight system capacity loss, regardless of the number of multicast groups. Our focus is on the physical layer without rate loss, but we also briefly discuss applications of the proposed scheduling in a cross-layer design subject to the loss rate QoS constraint.

The 60-GHz bands target multi-gigabit rate applications, such as high definition video streaming. Unfortunately, to provide multicast service, the strong directionality required at 60 GHz precludes serving all clients in a multicast group with a single transmission. Instead, a multicast transmission is comprised of a sequence of beam-formed transmissions (a beam group) that together cover all multicast group members. In this paper, we design, implement, and experimentally evaluate scalable directional multicast (SDM) as a technique to 1) train the access point with per-beam per-client RSSI measurements via partially traversing a codebook tree. The training balances the objectives of limiting overhead with collecting sufficient data to form efficient beam groups. 2) Using the available training information, we design a scalable beam grouping algorithm that approximates the minimum multicast group data transmission time. We implement the key components of SDM and evaluate with a combination of over-the-air experiments and trace-driven simulations. Our results show that the gains provided by SDM increase with group size and provide near-optimal group selection with significantly reduced training time, yielding up to 1.8 times throughput gains over exhaustive-search training and grouping.

Continuously enriched distributed systems in data centers generate much network traffic in push-style one-to-many group mode, raising new requirements for multicast transport in terms of efficiency and robustness. Existing reliable multicast solutions, which suffer from low robustness and inefficiency in either host-side protocols or multicast routing, are not suitable for data centers. In order to address the problems of inefficiency and low robustness, we present a sender-initiated, efficient, congestion-aware and robust reliable multicast solution mainly for small groups in SDN-based data centers, called MCTCP. The main idea behind MCTCP is to manage the multicast groups in a centralized manner, and reactively schedule multicast flows to active and low-utilized links, by extending TCP as the host-side protocol and managing multicast groups in the SDN-controller. The multicast spanning trees are calculated and adjusted according to the network status to perform a better allocation of resources. Our experiments show that, MCTCP can dynamically bypass the congested and failing links, achieving high efficiency and robustness. As a result, MCTCP outperforms the state-of-the-art reliable multicast schemes. Moreover, MCTCP improves the performance of data replication in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) compared with the original and TCP-SMO (an alternative reliable multicast scheme) based ones, e.g., achieves up to 1.5 × and 1.1 × improvements in terms of throughput, respectively.

In-packet bloom filter based multicast is a family of techniques that have been recently proposed to address scalability issues in IP multicast. The main problem motivating these techniques is that network forwarding elements supporting traditional IP multicast store group specific forwarding state for every multicast tree traversing the element, resulting in poor memory scalability in networks with many active groups. Techniques in this family address this problem by encoding multicast routing information into in-packet bloom filters, which are memory efficient, probabilistic data structures for representing set membership. However, in existing approaches the probabilistic nature of bloom filters results in false-positive packet delivery, thereby introducing forwarding anomalies, unnecessary bandwidth utilization, and violations of security policies. In this work we contribute BloomFlow, a novel approach to bloom filter based multicast in SDN that achieves substantial forwarding state reduction while eliminating false positive packet delivery. The BloomFlow approach compensates for the stochastic uncertainty associated with bloom filters by incorporating the SDN network controller’s knowledge of the network topology and traffic workload into the generation of variable length and false-positive-free bloom filters. We further contribute a set of extensions to the OpenFlow protocol that demonstrates how our approach can be integrated into OpenFlow enabled networks with minimal modifications to switch hardware. We implement a working system prototype by extending the Stanford OpenFlow 1.0 Reference Switch and the POX SDN controller. We evaluate our approach through both flow level simulation, and packet level network emulation with Mininet and real media streams. We demonstrate that multicast forwarding using BloomFlow can achieve significant reductions in memory requirements due to network forwarding state (up to a ∼ 79% reduction in realistic WAN topologies under heavy multicast workloads). We find that this forwarding state reduction can be achieved with minimal bandwidth utilization overhead (averaging under ∼ 1%), and that our approach successfully meets time constraints required for deployment in a real-time SDN controller.

Motivated by high quality multimedia and remote collaborative environments, we solve the problem of multigroup multicast routing with a~number of features important for real-world deployment of the interactive media technologies. Based on the ant colony optimization metaheuristic, our algorithm is the first to work with uncertain knowledge of underlying network capabilities and support on-the-fly media transcoding inside the multicast tree. New contributions of this work are described next. We present two extensions of the algorithm, which improve quality of the solution. We introduce an~integrated approach to solution of the problem, which is effective for both original solving from scratch as well as for new dynamic reconfiguration of multicast tree, where minimum perturbation of existing solution is desired. Experiments show that our algorithm is not only successful in maintaining existing communication with low number of unnecessary disruptions, but also capable of keeping the multicast trees efficient.

Reliable and QoS-aware multimedia delivery is one of the most important requirements to satisfy end user needs. IEEE 802.11 networks have become one of the most popular Internet access methods owing to their low-cost and fast connection speed. Multicasting is a transmission technique that can significantly increase network efficiency through the simultaneous delivery of the same multimedia content to multiple multicast group members. IEEE 802.11 describes several multicast protocols targeted to increase the robustness of audio and video delivery. Some researchers have investigated the performance of such multicast protocols in terms of their achievable throughput. However, for a better understanding of the suitability of the protocols for a QoS-aware multimedia transmission, an in-depth analysis of the achievable delay is needed. This study provides a detailed delay analysis and describes analytical models for estimating the average achievable delay of IEEE 802.11 multicast protocols co-existing with legacy stations. The proposed analytical models are compared against simulation results under various conditions and parameter configurations. The simulation results validate the accuracy of the proposed models.

Secondary users (SUs) can flexibly access licensed channels to improve the spectrum utilization in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In mobile cognitive radio ad hoc networks (MCRAHNs) where nodes can move, SUs are intermittently connected because of node mobility, as well as the uncertain channel availability. Providing multicast services in MCRAHNs is urgently needed with the compelling demand on service qualities and varieties, and the proliferation of cognitive technology. The benefits of network coding over multicast in traditional wireless networks or CRNs have been well demonstrated in existing works. However, the existing studies merely address the two crucial issues (i.e., uncertain channel availability and node mobility) together and, thereby, cannot be applied to network coding-based multicast in MCRAHNs. In this paper, we study the problem of network coding-based multicast in MCRAHNs considering both channel uncertainty and node mobility. We utilize discrete-time Markov chains to model the channel availability and node mobility in MCRAHNs, and we then formulate a spectrum-aware network coded multicast problem as an optimization problem, which minimizes the total transmission cost, subject to the timely successful delivery constraint and link transmission constraint. Since the formulated problem is hard to tackle according to mixed integer programing, we further design a distributed spectrum-aware cost-based (SACB) scheme based on the metric of forwarding benefit. With extensive simulations based on both synthetic and realistic traces, we show that, compared with existing schemes, SACB can achieve almost the minimum transmission cost while maintaining high multicast success probability.

Distributed mobility management (DMM) is currently being researched and standardized in academia and standardization development organizations for the purpose of overcoming the major issues of existing centralized mobility management. The most recent DMM protocols are being redesigned with regard to the control and data plane separation concept. However, at present, there is no solution for supporting IP multicast listeners in such new DMM environments. In this paper, we review ongoing academic research works, standardization activities and propose an IP multicast mobility design for the DMM environment using the control and data plane concept.

The graphical abstract in the form of Pareto front solutions showing the trade-offs between the objectives is depicted in Fig. 1.Display Omitted Wireless networks have finite battery source, so QoS aware multicast routing must also be energy efficient.There is trade-off between energy consumption and QoS guarantees (i.e. end-to-end delay, delay jitter and packet loss) provided by a wireless network.These requirements are formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem.Ant based multiobjective algorithms are proposed to build an energy efficient multicast tree.Simulation results are compared with NSGA-III. Most of the group communication technologies support real-time multimedia applications such as video conferencing and distributed gaming. These applications require quality-of-service (QoS) aware multicast routing protocol to deliver the same data stream to a predefined group of receivers. Since nodes in wireless networks are severely energy constrained due to finite battery source, hence it is of paramount importance that QoS aware multicast routing protocol be energy efficient. Transmission power control is one of the methods used to save energy. In this method, the nodes dynamically adjust the transmission power so that energy consumption in the tree is minimized. However, reduction in the transmission power increases the number of forwarding nodes in the multicast tree. This negatively impacts the QoS in terms of propagation delay, delay jitter, and packet loss etc. In wireless networks, there is a trade-off between the energy consumption and the QoS guarantees provided by the network. We unify these requirements into a multiobjective framework referred to as Energy Efficient QoS Multicast Routing (E2QoSMR). The goal is to simultaneously optimize the total power consumption and the QoS parameters in the multicast tree. We extend two algorithms based on metaphor of swarm intelligence for finding an energy efficient multicast tree satisfying the QoS guarantees. Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the correctness and efficiency of the algorithms. The simulation result of the algorithms is compared with the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm, NSGA-III. The experimental results are consolidated by statistical analyses that demonstrate the ability of the algorithms to generate the Pareto optimal solution set.

In this paper, we formulate an integer linear programming (ILP) to perform multicast routing and spectrum assignment (MRSA) in elastic optical networks, which serves jointly a set of multicast requests. In this formulation, all physical layer restrictions including modulation level assignment, maximum number of multicast capable nodes (MCNs), and maximum splitting degree (MSD) of MCNs, are considered. In addition, we modify the proposed joint ILP to serve multicast requests one-by-one, which is referred to as a separate ILP. Furthermore, we present three heuristic algorithms for MRSA, namely distance-based MRSA (DMRSA), congestion-based MRSA (CMRSA), and mixed CMRSA/DMRSA, which are applicable in both static and dynamic operation scenarios. In CMRSA and DMRSA, the link length and the amount of occupied spectrum are considered as the cost function of multicast routing, respectively; and in mixed CMRSA/DMRSA, a combination of normalized link length and normalized occupied spectrum is considered as the cost function. The comparison of ILPs and heuristic algorithms in static operation reveals that the joint ILP, as the benchmark, gives the optimum solution while has the most computational complexity. Furthermore, the separate ILP has lower complexity at the cost of consuming slightly more spectrum. Unless the DMRSA method, which has the worst performance, the gap between the other two heuristic algorithms and the ILPs is negligible. Furthermore, simulation results of dynamic operation scenarios reveal that mixed CMRSA/DMRSA outperforms other two heuristics algorithms in terms of blocking probability.

With the growing trend of deploying Software defined networks (SDN) in Internet and data centers, it is necessary to investigate the operation of multicast services in this paradigm shift. We propose an OpenFlowbased virtualized platform to support multiple multicast services simultaneously, each with their own customized multicast algorithms and performance-enhancing strategies for its service requirements. The contributions include: 1) systematic discussions of the technical challenges re-garding to implementing multicast services in SDN, with the proposed architectural components addressing these issues; 2) a virtualized platform enabling user-defined multicast services, independent of current Internet-based protocols; 3) experiments validating the necessity and efficiency of the platform in supporting its design goals and functionalities, with two additional real multicast applications further confirming the feasibility and operability of the proposed prototype.

Internet applications such as web based monitoring; live internet video, online video, video conference, webcam viewing and internet video to TV are highly used in today’s IP communication. The trends of these applications are, that they are played on mobile devices and distributed to many end users. Multicast communication over IP contributes to the end users applications distribution. It has been discovered by a CISCO research that mobile multicast traffic will soon reach zetabyte in 2019. The aim of this paper is to introduce new method that enable multicast in network mobility management. The new method is using context transfer and multicast fast reroute technique. The proposed method is quantitatively evaluated in terms of packet loss and service recovery time

Today’s multiprocessor platforms employ the network-on-chip (NoC) architecture as the preferable communication backbone. Conventional NoCs are designed predominantly for unicast data exchanges. In such NoCs, the multicast traffic is generally handled by converting each multicast message to multiple unicast transmissions. Hence, applications dominated by multicast traffic experience high queuing latencies and significant performance penalties when running on systems designed with unicast-based NoC architectures. Various multicast mechanisms such as XY-tree multicast and path multicast have already been proposed to enhance the performance of the traditional wireline mesh NoC incorporating multicast traffic. However, even with such added features, the multihop nature of the wireline mesh NoC leads to high network latencies and thus limits the achievable system performance. In this paper, to sustain the high-bandwidth and high-throughput requirements of emerging applications, we propose the design of a wireless NoC (WiNoC) architecture incorporating necessary multicast support. By integrating congestion-aware multicast routing with network coding, the WiNoC is able to efficiently handle heavy multicast injections. For applications running with a broadcast-heavy Hammer cache coherence protocol, the proposed multicast-aware WiNoC achieves an average of 47% reduction in message latency compared with the XY-tree-based multicast-aware mesh NoC. This network level improvement translates into a 26% saving in full-system energy delay product.

Mobile Ad Hoc Networking Does Not Own Any Fixed Infrastructure And Hence, Stable Routing Is The Major Problem. The Mobility Nature Of Manet’s Node Facilitates Rediscovery Of A New Path To Organizing A Routing. In Order To Intensify The Quality Of Service And Routing Stability In Manet, We Propose A Dynamic Quality Of Service Stability Based Multicast Routing Protocol By Modifying The Cuckoo Search Algorithm Through A Modernizing Mechanism Which Is Derived From The Differential Evolution Algorithm. Tuned Csa Is A Combined Feature Of Csa And De Algorithms. Periodically, Each Node In The Network Creates Neighbour Stability And Qos Database At Every Node By Calculating The Parameters Like Node And Link Stability Factor, Bandwidth Availability, And Delays. Finally, Multicast Path Constructs Route Request And Route Reply Packets, Stability Information And Performing Route Maintenance.

In this paper, joint multicast routing and channel assignment problem in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with hybrid traffic is investigated. Previous works design routing and channel assignment schemes for WMNs with single multicast session, however, resource usage is optimized for only one multicast session in this case and overall network load balance is left out of consideration. This may result in high congestion in some links, while others are underutilized. In this paper, multicast routing and channel assignment problem is solved from traffic management perspective by introducing load balance. Programming formulation is formulated to obtain the optimal results which can be used as benchmark to evaluate other schemes. Multicast weighted conflict graph is designed to model partially overlapped channels (POCs) interference in hybrid traffic scene. It regards links originating from the same node as one transmission to fully exploit wireless broadcast advantage; it uses link weight to measure interference degree and gives full consideration to interference characteristics of POCs. A heuristic multicast routing and channel assignment scheme based on multicast weighted conflict graph is designed to solve the joint problem, and simulation results show that the heuristic scheme can reduce network interference and improve WMNs service capability while dramatically reducing computational complexity.

Nowadays, several advanced ICT infrastructures demand multicast services able to jointly provide a high degree of reliability and good performances despite of failure occurrences. The current practice to tolerate failures in such services mainly consists in the adoption of methods based on temporal redundancy, where messages are successfully delivered to all the interested destinations by means of retransmissions. However, in such methods, a high degree of reliability is typically obtained at the expenses of severe performance fluctuations and instability. On the contrary, approaches that make use of forward error correction imply a more performance-friendly behavior; however, the effective tuning of such approaches is a critical and challenging task, which has limited their applicability in large-scale multicast services. This paper is aimed at presenting a solution to resolve this issue by effectively tuning the redundancy degree to be applied, so as to be able to tolerate the losses affecting the multicast communications without an excessive, and un-needed, workload imposed over the network. To this aim, we drawn from the experience of layered multicast, commonly applied to multimedia content delivery, for addressing such tunability problem. Specifically, we detail how to apply layered multicast within the context of a well known multicast service and how to determine the correct redundancy degree to be applied. We also make use of extensive simulations to evaluate the quality of the proposed approach in terms of reliability, performance and overhead, and to compare it with the best retransmission-based approach available in the literature.

Multicast routing improves the efficiency of a network by effectively utilizing the available network bandwidth. In multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks the channel allocation strategy plays a vital role along with multicast tree construction. However, the multicast routing problem in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks is proven to be NP-hard. With this paper, we propose a Quality of Service Channel Assignment and multicast Routing (Q-CAR) algorithm. The proposed algorithm jointly solves the channel assignment and multicast tree construction problem by intelligent computational methods. We use a slightly modified differential evolution approach for assigning channels to links. We design a genetic algorithm based multicast tree construction strategy which determines a delay, jitter bounded low cost multicast tree. Moreover, we define a multi objective fitness function for the tree construction algorithm which optimizes interference as well as tree cost. Finally, we compare the performance of Q-CAR with QoS Multicast Routing and Channel Assignment(QoS-MRCA) and intelligent Quality of service multicast routing and Channel Assignment(i-QCA) algorithm in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh network (simulated) environments. Our experimental results distinctly show the outstanding performance of the proposed algorithm.

With Software Defined Networking (SDN), IP multicast becomes promising again. For IPTV applications over SDN, existing works would not scale well since they are based on per-source trees. As control-plane in SDN is logically centralized, constructing multiple shared trees is more feasible than that in traditional IP networks. Thus, in this work, we present a locality-aware multicast approach (LAMA) to construct multi-group shared trees in SDN, where each shared tree covers multiple multicast groups. In LAMA, the controller first clusters the multicast sources located in the vicinity into the same multicast cluster. For each multicast cluster, the controller selects the center switch which has the minimum distance to all multicast sources as its rendezvous point (RP) and then constructs a shortest-path multicast tree from the RP to its hosts. Finally, based on the multi-group shared trees, the controller can establish coarse-grained flow entries into on-tree switches to reduce the number of installed flow entries. Emulations on the Ryu controller and the Mininet emulator show that only 2-5 shared trees would suffice. The computation time in the controller using LAMA is around 70ms, much less than hundreds ms required for per-source trees. Moreover, LAMA only establishes 2300 flow entries, 4% of that with per-source trees in a large topology.

Nowadays, the transition of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), in particular to IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), is evident [1] . However, in most commonly used implementations, not all IPv6 features are available. For example, current implementations are not very optimized for multicast, despite the many benefits multicast can offer with respect to the number of radio transmissions and the amount of consumed energy. In this paper we present Bidirectional Multicast RPL Forwarding (BMRF), a new multicast protocol that combines the best features of the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) multicast on the one hand and of Stateless Multicast RPL Forwarding (SMRF) on the other hand. The main features are bidirectionality and the ability to offer a choice between Link Layer broadcast and Link Layer unicast for which the threshold to decide for a mote, which link layer mode to choose, is mainly based on its number of interested children and the duty cycling rate. An implementation of BMRF is realized in Contiki. Our measurements show that BMRF, when using the optimal configuration, results in less radio transmissions, and less energy consumption, and higher packet delivery ratio compared to SMRF, often at the cost of a higher end-to-end delay.

WiFi direct (WD) network is of significant interest during public safety scenarios due to its easy, quick, and efficient implementation. WD provides device to device communication using the MAC and PHY layers specifications of 802.11 standards, which facilitate multiple communications channels and a number of transmission rates to cope with the requirements and challenges of emerging applications in public safety and disaster management. Although they achieve substantial benefits in terms of high throughput, it creates a performance anomaly problem, wherein the selection of a particular communication channel and transmission rate can significantly affect the performance of a wireless communication system. This paper investigates the problem of selecting the most favorable channel and rate for a multicast communication system in the context of public safety using a WD 802.11 network. To this end, M3-Cast protocol is proposed, which refers to a novel multi-rate multi-channel multicast scheme. M3-Cast not only chooses the most favorable communication channel and transmission rate, but also considers the implementation details of the underlying WD technology, thereby optimizing the overall system performance. M3-Cast is formulated analytically and evaluated by a complete system level simulation. The detailed results and the analysis considers a number of performance metrics, such as bit error rate, multicast capacity, and system throughput under different multiple input multiple output configurations, channel bandwidths, and various network radii. Consequently, the simulation and analytical results show that M3-Cast protocol outperforms the standard multicast protocol of WD by almost twofold in terms of system throughput.

With the ever-increasing demands for popular content sharing among humans, device-to-device (D2D) multicast communication, as a promising technology to support wireless services within a local area, is introduced in a 5G cellular network. However, the existing resource allocation approaches for D2D multicast communication usually consider only physical domain constraints but neglect social domain factors, which would result in ineffective D2D links between users unwilling to share interests. Different from existing works, the D2D multicast scheme proposed in this paper will produce effective D2D multicast links by sufficiently utilizing both the physical and social properties of mobile users, with the goal to maximize the throughput of the overall social-aware network and guarantee fairly allocation of the channel between different D2D multicast clusters. The scheme mainly consists of two parts, the formation of D2D multicast clusters and joint optimization of power and channel allocation. In the formation of D2D multicast clusters, members and head in each cluster are selected by taking into account both social attributes and physical factors, such as community, ties, and geographical closeness. In the joint optimization, a two-step scheme is designed to first calculate the optimal power allocation by geometric proximity and then select suitable cellular channels for each D2D multicast cluster utilizing an extended one-to-many bipartite graphs matching algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with heuristic algorithm and stochastic algorithm, the proposed scheme can increase the throughput of the overall social-aware network by about 5% and 50%, respectively.

Opportunistic Mobile Social Networks (OMSNs), formed by people moving around carrying mobile devices, enhance spontaneous communication among users that opportunistically encounter each other without additional infrastructure. Multicast is an important communication service in OMSNs. Most of the existing multicast algorithms neglect or adopt static social factors that are inadequate to catch nodes’ dynamic contact behavior. In this paper, we introduce dynamic social features and its enhancement to capture nodes’ contact behavior, consider more social relationships among nodes, and adopt community structure in the multicast compare-split schemes to select the best relay nodes to improve multicast efficiency. We propose two multicast algorithms based on these new features. The first one Multi-CSDO involves destination nodes only in community detection while the second one Multi-CSDR involves both the destination nodes and the relay candidates in community detection. The analysis of the algorithms is given and simulation results using two real OMSN traces show that our new algorithms outperform the existing ones in delivery rate, latency, and number of forwardings.

WiFi networks have been globally deployed and most mobile devices are currently WiFi-enabled. While WiFi has been proposed for multimedia content distribution, its lack of adequate support for multicast services hinders its ability to provide multimedia content distribution to a large number of devices. In this paper, we present the AMuSe system, whose objective is to enable scalable and adaptive WiFi multicast services. AMuSe is based on accurate receiver feedback and incurs a small control overhead. In particular, we develop an algorithm for dynamic selection of a subset of the multicast receivers as feedback nodes, which periodically send information about the channel quality to the multicast sender. This feedback information can be used by the multicast sender to optimize multicast service quality, e.g., by dynamically adjusting transmission bitrate. AMuSe does not require any changes to the standards or any modifications to the WiFi devices. We implemented AMuSe on the ORBIT testbed and evaluated its performance in large groups with approximately 200 WiFi devices , both with and without interference sources. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that AMuSe can provide accurate feedback in a dense multicast environment. It outperforms several alternatives even in the case of external interference and changing network conditions.

Dynamic data transfer demands are often being a challenge for present communication networks, as they appear in unpredictable time and must be satisfied prior to deadline. Important kind are the multi-target demands occurring in task of replication, backup, database synchronization or file transferring in pear-to-pear networks. Optimal scheduling usually depends of the nature of transport network. In the paper dynamic deadline-driven multicast scheduling problem over elastic optical network is considered. Particularly, the method for improving link utilization by traffic balance for multicast demands is proposed. Few heuristic algorithms and results of experiments, proving the benefits of balancing concept are presented

The application of the three-parameter game balance is proposed through an analysis of the relationship among the space, energy, and data factors.The same correlation coefficient among the vectors is used for a general game balance scheme, to find the point, list the matrix, and confirm the confidence margins of game balance.The model and system is scalable and easy to be extended to more factors.The approach can be extended to change the proportion of different factors in practice.Numbers of experiences have been done to prove that the approach can attain better efficient than former work. In increasingly important sensor grid networks, multicast routing is widely used in date aggregation and distributed query processing. It requires multicast trees for efficient data transmissions. However, sensor nodes in such networks typically have limited resources and computing power. Efforts have been made to consider the space, energy and data factors separately to optimize the network performance. Considering these factors simultaneously, this paper presents a game balance based multi-factor multicast routing approach for sensor grid networks. It integrates the three factors into a unified model through a linear combination. The model is standardized and then solved theoretically by using the concept of game balance from game theory. The solution gives Nash equilibrium, implying a well balanced result for all the three factors. The theoretic results are implemented in algorithms for cluster formation, cluster core selection, cluster tree construction, and multicast routing. Extensive simulation experiments show that the presented approach gives mostly better overall performance than benchmark methods.

The default multicast transport of the IEEE 802.11 standard does not use any feedback policy to detect and retransmit missing packets. Consequently, it has a limited reliability. In this paper we introduce the Block Negative Acknowledgment (BNAK) protocol as a solution for a reliable multicast transport in wireless networks. Using BNAK, the Access Point (AP) transmits a block of multicast packets followed by a Block Negative acknowledgement Request (BNR). Upon the reception of a BNR, a multicast member sends a BNAK response, only if it has some missing packets. A BNAK is acknowledged and therefore is delivered reliably to the AP. Moreover it is transmitted after channel contention in order to avoid eventual collisions with other feedbacks. Under the assumption that (1) the receiver is located within the coverage area of the sender, (2) the multicast packets are delivered using the appropriate data rate and (3) the collisions are avoided, the Packet Error Rate (PER) of the network becomes very low. To guarantee a limited PER, BNAK requires the use of a collision prevention feature (such as CTS-to-Self), and defines a retirement/reactivation procedure. Thus few feedbacks are generated and the bandwidth is saved. We show that our protocol has very high scalability and outperforms the proposals defined by 802.11v and 802.11aa considerably. Particularly our protocol can achieve a throughput exceeding 10 times that of GCR-BACK.

We present a novel control scheme that dynamically optimizes multirate multicast. By computing the differential backlog at every node, our scheme adaptively allocates transmission rates per session/user pair in order to maximize throughput. An important feature of the proposed scheme is that it does not require source cooperation or centralized calculations. This methodology leads to efficient and distributed algorithms that scale gracefully and can be embraced by low-cost wireless devices. Additionally, it is shown that maximization of sum utility is possible by the addition of a virtual queue at each destination node of the multicast groups. The virtual queue captures the desire of the individual user and helps in making the correct resource allocation to optimize total utility. Under the operation of the proposed schemes backlog sizes are deterministically bounded, which provides delay guarantees on delivered packets. To illustrate its practicality, we present a prototype implementation in the NITOS wireless testbed. The experimental results verify that the proposed schemes achieve maximum performance while maintaining low complexity., National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant CNS-0915988), National Science Foundation (U.S.) (grant CNS-1116209), United States. Office of Naval Research (grant N00014-12-1-0064)

Random network coding (RNC) is a promising solution for multicast services over wireless networks. In this paper, we consider the problem of deadline-constrained multimedia multicast from a single transmitter to multiple users over wireless erasure channels. A novel transmission scheduling strategy based on adaptive RNC is developed to maximize the throughput of multicast sessions under a deterministic delay constraint. Particularly, we optimize the number of multimedia data layers under different assumptions on users' feedback. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

We consider the multicast scheduling problem for the block transmission of packets in a heterogeneous network using a half-duplex relay station (RS). The RS uses random linear coding to efficiently transmit packets over time-varying multicast channels. Our goal is to minimize the average decoding delay. Because of the half-duplex operation, at each time slot, the RS must decide to either: 1) fetch a new packet for encoding from the base station or 2) multicast a coded packet to wireless users. Thus, optimal scheduling hinges on exploiting multicast opportunities while persistently supplying the encoder (at the RS) with new packets. We formulate an associated fluid control problem and show that the optimal policy incorporates opportunism across multicast channels, i.e., the RS performs a multicast transmission only if the collection of channel conditions is favorable; otherwise, it performs a fetch. Based on the fluid policy, we propose an online algorithm. We prove that our algorithm asymptotically incurs no more than 4/3 and 2 times the optimal delay, for two-user and arbitrary number of user system, respectively. Simulation results show that, in fact, our algorithm’s performance is very close to theoretical bounds.

Group communication over multicast ad hoc network suffers from insufficient utilization of limited resources, i.e. shared channel, battery, data processing capabilities and storage space etc. Multicast routing protocol should be able to manage all these resources because their consumption depends upon different factors, i.e. Unicast/Multicast network operations, dynamic topology due to mobility, control overhead due to scalability, packet loss and retransmission due to collision and congestion etc. All these factors may cause unnecessary network load, delay and unfair resource utilization. However, multicast ad hoc routing protocols are more efficient than Unicast routing protocols, but they also suffer from performance degradation factors discussed above. Researchers have developed various layer wise solutions for resource optimization. In this paper, we will explore the different schemes for fair utilization of network resources.

The objective of this paper is to re-evaluate multicast structures for wireless multihop networks by taking interference into account. We group nodes in multicast routing structures into different classes based on their roles in the multicast routing. Through mathematical analyses of these different node classes under an accurate interference model, we derive optimal routing strategies for the different classes in the presence of interference. These analyses inform the design of four interference-aware multicast routing algorithms. We evaluate the performances of our proposed algorithms using wireless network simulations, where we have implemented a detailed model of wireless communication. We show that, by taking interference into account when building the multicast routing structures, our proposed algorithms are able to significantly improve throughput, delay, and robustness compared to existing multicast routing algorithms, which do not consider interference.

communication over multicast ad hoc network suffers from insufficient utilization of limited resources, i.e. shared channel, battery, data processing capabilities and storage space, etc. Multicast routing protocol should be able to manage all these resources because their consumption depends upon different factors, i.e. Unicast/Multicast network operations, dynamic topology due to mobility, control overhead due to scalability, packet loss and retransmission due to collision and congestion etc. All these factors may cause unnecessary network load, delay and unfair resource utilization. However, multicast ad hoc routing protocols are more efficient than Unicast routing protocols, but they also suffer from performance degradation factors discussed above. Researchers have developed various layer wise solutions for resource optimization. In this paper, we will explore the different schemes for fair utilization of network resources and also perform a simulation based analysis to investigate the impact of MAC layer over the performance of multicast routing protocols and network resources.

The Internet Protocol Version 6 was designed to efficiently improve on the existing functionalities of Internet Protocol Version 4 and to introduce new constructs that it lacks. Though IPv6 is not an extension of IPv4, as the two protocols have different specifications. Both the new and the formal protocol use multicast routing for many of their operations; this implies multicast routing is core in the protocols. This experiment became imperative especially in this era everyone is looking forward to using IPv6 as the default network. This paper tested the performance of IPv6 multicast routing over a virtual local area network. Graphical Network Simulator 3 was used to configure the network and Microsoft Hyper-V was used as the hypervisor on which the six virtual machines (hosts) reside. Parameters such as throughput, latency variations, data loss and the network over heads were examined. The experiment has shown that, IPv6 multicast routing over a virtual network has 100% throughput, the jitter (variations in latency) varies among the hosts in all the running scenarios, but low and stabled jitters were noticed as the running duration increases and the number of streaming increase from one multicast stream to running two multicast streams simultaneously. There was no data loss.

Scalable video coding, together with adaptive modulation and coding, is a promising technique for providing real-time video multicast services on mobile stations (MSs) in heterogeneous channel conditions. On the other hand, since MSs are often powered by batteries, reducing the energy consumption of mobile devices is an important concern. In this paper, we study the problem of scalable video multicast scheduling in a mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) network with the objective of maximizing the multicast energy throughput. This problem has never been seriously studied when the assumption that different multicast groups may partially overlap is made. We prove that this problem is NP-complete. Our proposed solution, which is called energy-efficient multicast scheduling with adaptive modulation and coding (EEMS-AMC), consists of three modules, namely, online admission control, base-layer data scheduling, and enhancement-layer data scheduling. The admission control rules not only help the base station to admit the maximum number of video streams but ensure that the video data can be delivered to mobile users within the timeliness requirement as well. Moreover, EEMS-AMC adopts the greedy strategy to schedule base-layer data such that even in the worst-case scenario, the average duty cycle of admitted MSs can be within a bounded factor from the theoretical minimum. Finally, EEMS-AMC employs the metric “expected multicast throughput” to derive the proper modulation and coding scheme for each enhancement-layer data and employs the metric “marginal multicast energy throughput” to efficiently derive near-optimal enhancement-layer data scheduling. Simulation results exhibit that EEMS-AMC achieves relatively good performances in terms of multicast energy throughput and normalized total utility.

Mobile IPTV applications are becoming very popular worldwide. According to CISCO research, mobile Internet video usage is increasing rapidly each year and soon reaching zettabyte threshold in 2019. With the increase number of traffic, it is a great effort for internet service provider to provide acceptable network performance. The objective of this paper is to mathematically evaluate a new proposed mobile multicast technique to support high performance mobile IP traffic. The new technique enhanced multicast services in Network Mobility Management which is Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). The evaluation is done using mathematical equations that are derived from signaling call flow of the multicast process in the proposed technique. Results are analyzed and compared with the current base solution technique. Using mathematical analysis this paper validates and highlights the strengths of the proposed technique compared to the existing technique.

Cooperative wireless multicast is investigated, in which a source sends multicast messages to a number of users. For a multicast message from the source, some users do not successfully receive the message (called unsuccessful users). For a successful user (who successfully receives the message from the source), we define its worst relaying channel gain as the smallest channel gain among its channel gains to all unsuccessful users. It is proposed that the successful user whose worst relaying channel gain is the highest among the worst relaying channel gains of all successful users is selected to serve as a relay. Considering that the channels in the system are independent but nonidentically distributed Rayleigh fading, we derive a closed-form outage probability expression for the proposed scheme. It is shown that the proposed scheme can achieve full diversity, and thus, having a larger number of users can improve the outage performance. Furthermore, we study the time allocation strategy that determines the durations used by the source and the selected relay for their transmissions, respectively. An approximate optimal time allocation is derived. In addition, we also investigate the case with relay selection error and the case with mixed Rayleigh/Rician fading. Simulation results verify the performance of the proposed cooperative multicast scheme and time allocation strategy.

Optical splitters are utilized in optical nodes for splitting the received signal into multiple copies, in order to efficiently provide multicast capabilities in optical networks. In practice, only a fraction of the network nodes are equipped with optical splitters. These nodes are called multicast-capable (MC) and the remaining nodes are called Multicast Incapable (MI). In some networks, if the MI nodes are destinations of the multicast request, they can drop a small fraction of the incoming signal's power locally and transmit the rest to the next node. This ability is called Drop-and-Continue (DaC) and the relevant networks are called DaC networks. In the absence of the DaC capabilities, the network is called Drop-or-Continue (DoC). The current paper deals with both aforementioned categories of networks, and proposes three heuristic algorithms for the efficient allocation of a limited number of MC nodes in the network, so as to achieve a low average cost of the light-trees that are calculated for routing the multicast requests. It is shown through simulations that the proposed techniques significantly outperform the relevant conventional splitter placement techniques. This work also investigates the impact of networks having DaC rather than DoC capabilities, as well as the impact of the percentage of MC nodes on the network performance, providing guidance for the efficient design of optical networks with sparse multicasting capabilities.