Bloom Filter-Based Ad Hoc Multicast Communication in Cyber-Physical Systems and Computational Materials

This article presents an efficient ad hoc multicast communication protocol for next-generation cyber-physical systems and computational materials. Communication with such systems would be gestural, and when cells within such materials detect a motion, they would share that information with each other. We want to achieve efficient communication among only the group of nodes that sense a particular (gestural) event. Our approach is to employ a Bloom filter-based approach to label the multicast group with an approximate error-resilient multicast tag that captures the temporal and spatial characteristics of the sensor group. A Bloom filter is a space-efficient probabilistic data structure that is used to test whether an element is a member of a set. We describe our Bloom filter-based multicast communication (BMC) protocol, and report simulation results.