IP Multicasting in HF Radio Networks

Military applications for multicasting abound. In this paper, the authors propose a multicast data link protocol for Third-Generation (3G) High Frequency (HF) radio networks, and evaluate its ability to support IP multicasting of military messages in HF radio networks. Multicasting is a one-to-many traffic delivery technique employed at the physical, link, and/or network layers. Traffic flowing from an originating node is delivered more or less simultaneously to multiple receivers. In some applications, only one node originates traffic to its multicast group, while in others any member of a multicast group can originate traffic that is sent to all members of the group.