Stateless overlay multicast with in-packet bloom filters

Due to the difficulty of deploying Internet protocol (IP) multicast on the Internet on a large scale, overlay multicast has been considered as a promising alternative to develop the multicast communication in recent years. However, the existing overlay multicast solutions suffer from high costs to maintain the state information of nodes in the multicast forwarding tree. A stateless overlay multicast scheme is proposed, in which the multicast routing information is encoded by a bloom filter (BF) and encapsulated into the packet header without any need for maintaining the multicast forwarding tree. Our scheme leverages the node heterogeneity and proximity information in the physical topology and hierarchically constructs the transit-stub overlay topology by assigning geometric coordinates to all overlay nodes. More importantly, the scheme uses BF technology to identify the nodes and links of the multicast forwarding tree, which improves the forwarding efficiency and decreases the false-positive forwarding loop. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposal can achieve high forwarding efficiency and good scalability.