Multinet — A wake-up protocol for multicast network groups

A distributed network management architecture is proposed, that enables a coordinated wake-up and sleep of peers within a switched network in embedded systems. Related stations are clustered in groups, can wake up their direct neighbors and propagate the wake-up reason. Stations use multicast for network management related communication, which facilitates addressing and reduces overall network load introduced by the protocol. The proposed architecture provides a service infrastructure to applications allowing them to request or suspend groups of network nodes. Functional principles are given and examples are shown on how applications may use the proposed services to realize different forms of network management in a sense of allowing stations which are not needed at a given time to shut down and preserve power. It is also shown that in case of failures, the system is able to maintain a safe and consistent state.