Multicast Routing over Industrial Internet of Things

In the industrial sector, we are currently witnessing the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, commonly known as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This cutting-edge digital technology relies heavily on connectivity, real-time processing, machine-to-machine communication, and machine learning. In this context, the imperatives of reliability, flexibility, mobility, and cost-effectiveness have led to a strong push towards Low-power and Lossy Networks (LLN) solutions for industrial systems. IP multicast presents a solution for a multitude of IIoT applications, ranging from over-the-air programming and information sharing to device configuration and resource discovery. It achieves this by enabling the transmission of packets from a single source to multiple destinations, thereby conserving resources such as bandwidth, energy, and time. The IPv6 over IEEE 802.15.4 TSCH (6TiSCH), as implemented, does not handle multicast traffic. To meet their needs, this document aims to propose an approach for implementing multicast in 6TiSCH networks via unicast without affecting MAC layer protocols. A series of extensive simulations were conducted to evaluate the performance of the multicast protocols under scrutiny. The obtained results not only affirm the viability of our proposed approach for implementing multicasting in 6TiSCH networks but also highlight the superior performance of ESMRF and BMFA when compared to MPL in terms of resource consumption and end-to-end delays. They also demonstrate the reliability of MPL.