BMFA: bi-directional multicast forwarding algorithm for RPL-based 6LoWPANs

In scenarios involving point-to-multipoint network traffic, transmitting to each destination individually with unicast may lead to poor utilisation of network bandwidth, excessive energy consumption caused by the high number of packets and suffers from low scalability as the number of destinations increases. An alternative approach, would be to use network-layer multicast, where packets are transmitted to multiple destinations simultaneously. In doing so, applications adopting a one-tomany communication paradigm may improve their energy efficiency and bandwidth utilisation. In this paper, we present Bi-directional Multicast Forwarding Algorithm (BMFA), a novel RPL-based multicast forwarding mechanism. BMFA improves its pre-predecessor SMRF in that it allows multicast traffic to travel both upwards as well as downwards in an RPL tree. At the same time, it retains SMRF’s low latency and very low energy consumption characteristics. Our performance evaluation results, conducted using the Contiki operating system, show that BMFA outperforms its rival Trickle Multicast/Multicast Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (TM/MPL), in terms of reducing both delay and energy consumption.