Internet of things (IoT) has become one of the most important fields in computing arena. The environments of IoT require highly efficient, immediate and worldwide communication services. Accordingly, efficient multicast routing architecture is a fundamental premise for IoT. This paper proposes a mixed multicast architecture for IoT environments that employs the centric, hierarchical, and distributed traditional multicast architectures. The aim is to determine the most suitable traditional multicast architecture, relative to the current state of the IoT system. First, an algorithm to manage the proposed multicast architecture is introduced. Then, an IoT case study for each traditional multicast architecture is demonstrated. Finally, a simulation environment is established, using the network simulator package NS2, to measure the performance of the proposed architecture. The considered performance metrics are end-to-end delay, packet loss, throughput, energy consumption, and transformation rate between traditional multicast architectures. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed architecture relative to individual traditional multicast architectures.

Introduction

Unicast, multicast, and broadcast are three basic methods used to transmit data over a network. Implementation of unicast and broadcast is considered a straightforward process because packets are sent to a unique receiver, or will be propagated to all network nodes. A multicast implementation is considered more complex because users must be distributed into groups and their locations re-identified. For security, traffic must also be managed and controlled to prevent distribution to unnecessary destinations. This also saves bandwidth for other data transmissions [1–۴]. Multicast traffic on a network should be managed by the Internet Service Provider (ISP). However, the volume of traffic sent using the multicast method is increasing [5–۹]. Websites using video and audio depend on multicast technology, which leads to a requirement to deliver a huge number of identical packets to a high number of users simultaneously. The replication of these packets also occurs at an exponential rate. The required bandwidth and routing overhead for these types of websites may be extremely high [10–۱۴]. The IoT is generally defined as the interconnection between objects, passive or active, to support different types of applications. Heterogeneous devices and applications are supplied by vendors globally, all of which should be accommodated. As a result, researchers try to adapt modern IoT methodologies, protocols, and technologies using the standard TCP/IP protocol developed for the traditional Internet [15–۱۸]. IoT has different specifications to the traditional Internet however, and IoT systems comprise very large numbers of resource-constrained nodes. IoT environments may, therefore, have limited power nodes that are required to work for long periods of time. By its nature, IoT also creates many challenges with security, addressing, and routing. The construction of multicast architectures is one of the most important challenges in an IoT environment [19–۲۳]. Power limitations also make multicasting in IoT networks expensive; this is because a single multicast will contain a sequence of multi-hop forwarding stages, which wakes up many nodes and consumes additional power. Heterogeneity of devices in IoT systems also means that the flooding of multicast packets may lead to unpredicted situations [24–۲۸]. There is, therefore, a requirement for a new multicast architecture to be designed, which considers the special characteristics of IoT systems.