Research Article
BMFA: Bi-Directional Multicast Forwarding Algorithm for RPL-based 6LoWPANs
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-319-52727-7_3, author={Georgios Papadopoulos and Andreas Georgallides and Theo Tryfonas and George Oikonomou}, title={BMFA: Bi-Directional Multicast Forwarding Algorithm for RPL-based 6LoWPANs}, proceedings={Interoperability, Safety and Security in IoT. Second International Conference, InterIoT 2016 and Third International Conference, SaSeIoT 2016, Paris, France, October 26-27, 2016, Revised Selected Papers}, proceedings_a={INTERIOT \& SASEIOT}, year={2017}, month={2}, keywords={Internet of things 6LoWPAN Wireless sensor networks IPv6 Multicast Trickle}, doi={10.1007/978-3-319-52727-7_3} }- Georgios Papadopoulos
Andreas Georgallides
Theo Tryfonas
George Oikonomou
Year: 2017
BMFA: Bi-Directional Multicast Forwarding Algorithm for RPL-based 6LoWPANs
INTERIOT & SASEIOT
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-52727-7_3
Abstract
In scenarios involving point-to-multipoint network traffic, transmitting to each destination individually with unicast may lead to poor utilisation of network bandwidth, excessive energy consumption caused by the high number of packets and suffers from low scalability as the number of destinations increases. An alternative approach, would be to use network-layer multicast, where packets are transmitted to multiple destinations simultaneously. In doing so, applications adopting a one-to-many communication paradigm may improve their energy efficiency and bandwidth utilisation. In this paper, we present Bi-directional Multicast Forwarding Algorithm (BMFA), a novel RPL-based multicast forwarding mechanism. BMFA improves its pre-predecessor SMRF in that it allows multicast traffic to travel both upwards as well as downwards in an RPL tree. At the same time, it retains SMRF’s low latency and very low energy consumption characteristics. Our performance evaluation results, conducted using the Contiki operating system, show that BMFA outperforms its rival Trickle Multicast/Multicast Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (TM/MPL), in terms of reducing both delay and energy consumption.