Planning and Management of Dynamic Publish-Subscribe Communications in Tactical Networks using Multicast Groups

A challenge in planning and managing publish-subscribe (pub-sub) communications in tactical environments is making efficient use of IP multicast services with limited multicast address space, i.e., optimally associating pub-sub topics with multicast groups to minimize reception of unsubscribed information at receiver nodes and sending of duplicate information at sender nodes. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a scheme for assigning multiple pub-sub topics to each multicast group intelligently such that members of each multicast group have overlapping information needs to a maximum extent. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is quite efficient and the efficiency increases with the size of available multicast address pool. The proposed scheme is set in the context of a two-tier information dissemination system architecture for tactical networks consisting of a central planner in a single node, and a dissemination executive in every node. The central planner generates and disseminates the multicast address plan for pub-sub topics to other nodes. The dissemination executive at each node subscribes or publishes information to multicast groups in accordance with the plan and provides pub-sub services to applications in the node.