GOR: Group-oblivious multicast routing in airborne tactical networks under uncertainty

Abstract

Disseminating mission assignment messages always requires effective and flexible multicast routing scheme design in airborne tactical networks, in particular, when the multicast group members are under uncertainty. Traditional IP multicast routing strategies have little regard for the uncertainty of multicasting in airborne tactical networks, wherein the multicast groups are highly unpredictable and are changing over different sessions. In this work, we present a group-oblivious multicast routing strategy, termed as GOR, to hedge against the uncertainty of multicasting in airborne tactical networks. GOR exploits Bit Index Explicit Replication (BIER) technique for the sake of stateless multicast. In order to minimize multicast delay, GOR re-formulates the hierarchical deployment of BIER into a modified group Steiner tree problem for a better routing. Both analytical and experimental results demonstrate that the presented GOR can provide reasonably better multicast performance across all possible sets of group members.