Team Oriented Multicast: A Scalable Routing Protocol for Large Mobile Networks

This paper proposes a multicast protocol, called Team Oriented Multicast (TOM). TOM builds up a “motion aware hierarchy to support efficient, scalable team multicast protocol. TOM identifies clusters of nodes with same affinity as teams and manages the multicast membership information using the unit of team rather than dealing with individual node members. TOM uses a two-tier data dissemination approach where the source propagates a data packet to each subscribed teams leader and each leader forwards the data to the entire team. TOM constructs a multicast mesh structure among leaders of subscribed teams, where each leader is connected to m other parent leaders, receiving duplicate packet streams from each parent. Each team leader proactively maintains the list of nodes in the same multicast mesh. The main contributions of TOM (which set it apart from general hierarchical multicasting protocols) are (1) TOM provides an efficient and scalable multicasting protocol exploiting affinity team model, which is a realistic model for many MANET applications and makes the mobility management much simpler; (2) using a m-ary mesh structure and multi-path neighbor aggregation technique, TOM provides a highly reliable data transmission platform with fairly low redundancy overhead; (3) the proactive maintenance of membership information between team leaders can supply useful QoS information to multimedia applications. Simulation results show the effectiveness, scalability and reliability of TOM in various representative scenarios.