BIER-Like Multicast for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Tactical Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs) often rely on multicast to carry their traffic, e.g., time-sensitive and critical mission data and situational awareness information. Implementing efficient and scalable multicast forwarding in MANETs can be challenging. Traditional protocols require perflow state at intermediate nodes, leading to high overhead and vulnerability to nodes' mobility. BIER is a recent multicast proposal (for static networks) that eliminates the need for explicit distribution trees or group membership information by addressing multiple destinations via a bit-string in each packet's header. This paper identifies and addresses several challenges in designing a BIER-like multicast scheme for MANETs, including using hashing to map bit indices (from the bit-string) to IP addresses (slots in a routing table implemented as a hashtable), proposing header constructions to preserve bandwidth, and supporting forwarding using longest prefix matching.