Abstract
•Novel mechanism to support multicast data forwarding for LOADng.•Construction of a multicast routing tree able to routing data both upward and downward.•Performance evaluation of the proposed solution through a real testbed.
The Lightweight On-demand Ad hoc Distance-vector Routing Protocol – Next Generation (LOADng) is an emerging routing solution for low-power wireless networks, which is receiving much attention and is being adopted in Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Although the current literature has introduced improvements to allow the protocol to fulfill the requirements of a higher set of IoT applications, the multicast support stills a deficiency of the protocol. Thus, to overcome this limitation, this study proposes a multicast improvement for LOADng. The proposal, named Multicast LOADng (M-LOADng) introduces a new route discovery process to enable the construction of a multicast routing tree and perform forwarding multicast data messages. The proposed solution also introduces mechanisms to reduce the control message overhead and increase the reliability of the route discovery process. Further, M-LOADng allows multicast data transmission in three different modes. The conducted experiments, through a real testbed, show that the proposed solution can reach a reliable and constant performance in terms of quality-of-service, energy consumption, and memory usage, even when increasing the multicast group size.