Limiting the flooding of simplified multicast forwarding to a defined scope

We discuss efficient methods for delivering traffic to a group of receivers that is expected to be in close proximity of each other. The methods are based on techniques for efficient flooding of the whole network. If the network covers a large military unit such as a battalion and the data is meant for one company, it is not resource efficient to flood the data to the whole battalion. Therefore, in this article we discuss improvements to Simplified Multicast Forwarding (SMF) that can limit SMF's flooding of a packet to a smaller segment of the network. We also propose a method where the new SMF techniques are used in conjunction with connectionless multicast (Xcast) to improve the flexibility and robustness of the forwarding method.