Distributed Hashing for Scalable Multicast in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

Several multicast protocols for mobile ad hoc networks have been proposed, which build multicast trees by using location information that is available from the Global Positioning System (GPS) or localization algorithms and use geographic forwarding to forward packets down the multicast trees. These stateless multicast protocols carry encoded membership, location, and tree information in each packet and are more efficient and robust than stateful protocols (for example, ADMR and ODMRP), as they avoid the difficulty of maintaining distributed state in the presence of frequent topology changes. However, current stateless multicast protocols are not scalable to large groups because of the per-packet encoding overhead, and the centralized group membership and location management. We present the hierarchical rendezvous point multicast (HRPM) protocol, which significantly improves the scalability of stateless multicast with respect to the group size. HRPM consists of two key design ideas: 1) hierarchical decomposition of a large group into a hierarchy of recursively organized manageable-sized subgroups and 2) the use of distributed geographic hashing to construct and maintain such a hierarchy at virtually no cost. Our detailed simulations demonstrates that HRPM achieves significantly enhanced scalability and performance due to hierarchical organization and distributed hashing.