A novel group communication protocol using the RingNet hierarchy in mobile Internet

In recent years, Internet computing and wireless communications are converging. The converged networks are usually called mobile Internet. We propose a novel group communication model called the RingNet model or the RingNet hierarchy for group communications in mobile Internet. This hierarchy is a combination of logical rings and logical trees, which takes advantages of the simplicity of logical rings and the scalability of logical trees. More importantly, this combination makes this hierarchy highly resilient to failures compared to other hierarchies such as a tree-based hierarchy. Based on this hierarchy, we propose a novel group communication protocol in mobile Internet. The proposed protocol consists of three algorithms: membership propagation, topology maintenance, and multicast dissemination. The proposed protocol is local-information-based in the sense that each network entity in the hierarchy independently propagates membership information along the hierarchy, and that each network entity only needs to maintain local information about its neighbors for topology maintenance, and also that each network entity independently disseminates multicast messages to some of its neighbors. Simulation studies show that the proposed protocol based on the RingNet hierarchy scales very well when the size of the network becomes large, and that it is highly resilient to failures when the node failure probability becomes large.