Design and performance evaluation of mixed multicast architecture for internet of things environment

Internet of things (IoT) has become one of the most important fields in computing arena. The environments of IoT require highly efficient, immediate and worldwide communication services. Accordingly, efficient multicast routing architecture is a fundamental premise for IoT. This paper proposes a mixed multicast architecture for IoT environments that employs the centric, hierarchical, and distributed traditional multicast architectures. The aim is to determine the most suitable traditional multicast architecture, relative to the current state of the IoT system. First, an algorithm to manage the proposed multicast architecture is introduced. Then, an IoT case study for each traditional multicast architecture is demonstrated. Finally, a simulation environment is established, using the network simulator package NS2, to measure the performance of the proposed architecture. The considered performance metrics are end-to-end delay, packet loss, throughput, energy consumption, and transformation rate between traditional multicast architectures. The results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed architecture relative to individual traditional multicast architectures.