A survey on current status of Disruption Tolerant Network support for Multicast

Internet of Things (IoT) devices used in mining, agriculture, and environmental sensing often require Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN) support, since end-to-end network connectivity may not always available in distributed and sparsely populated locations. Data mules such as workers or vehicles, which pass through the monitored area periodically, bridge the gap between disconnected networks. Since data dissemination often involves multiple users, and configuration updates from the Monitoring and Control Center needs to be delivered reliably to all participating IoT devices, the combination of efficient Reliable Multicast algorithms with DTN should address this problem effectively. This paper examines the current status of DTN support for multicast from different design aspect of routing protocols and summarizes some of the open issues related to the design of Reliable Multicast DTN (RMDTN) protocols for IoT.