Lightweight multicast forwarding for service discovery in low-power IoT networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) will interconnect billions of devices (denoted as “Smart Objects,” SOs) in an IP-based Internet-like structure. SOs are typically sensor/actuator-equipped devices with severe constraints on processing capabilities, available RAM/ROM, and energy consumption. In a context where billions of deployed SOs, it is important that the SOs are able to self-configure and adapt to the surrounding environment with minimal, if any, external human intervention. Among the service discovery mechanisms proposed in literature for deploying SOs without any prior knowledge, Zeroconf represents a good candidate to automate service and resource discovery in local constrained environments. In this paper, we propose a lightweight forwarding algorithm for efficient multicast support in Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) targeting service discovery for duty-cycled SOs. Among the advantages achieved by the proposed solution, SOs might benefit from smaller memory footprint with respect to those required by other multicast implementations. The performance of the proposed forwarding algorithm is evaluated through Contiki-based nodes in the Cooja simulator.