BIER-Star: Stateless Geographic Multicast for Scalable Satellite-Terrestrial Integration
Mostafa Abdollahi, Wenjun Yang, Jianping Pan
TL;DR
BIER-Star tackles scalable multicast in integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks by leveraging a two-layer H3 geocell framework to aggregate receivers and satellites. This stateless design, combined with IGMP-based membership and a precomputed geospatial path encoded in headers, reduces overhead and eliminates per-flow state at satellites. Evaluations demonstrate significantly smaller headers and robust reach under dynamic LEO conditions, outperforming traditional and segmented BIER approaches. The approach enables efficient multicast for large-scale TN-NTN deployments, with practical impact on emergency alerts, large updates, and real-time broadcasts.
Abstract
The rapid expansion of LEO satellite constellations has enabled an integrated terrestrial network and non-terrestrial network (TN-NTN), connecting diverse users such as aircraft, ships, and remote communities. These networks increasingly need a scalable and efficient multicast protocol for critical applications like emergency alerts, large-scale software updates, and real-time broadcasting. However, traditional multicast protocols, such as IP-based multicast and software-defined multicast approaches, introduce significant control overhead and struggle to adapt to the dynamic and mobile nature of satellite topologies. This paper presents BIER-Star, a stateless multicast protocol designed for the integrated TN-NTN. BIER-Star uses a two-layer geospatial gridding scheme (i.e., H3) to encode destinations as Earth- and space-cell identifiers rather than per-terminal addresses. This cell-based abstraction shortens the header bitstring, simplifies forwarding, and eliminates per-flow state and complex signaling. Our simulations indicate that BIER-Star reduces header size versus BIER and avoids geographic path-finding failures seen in greedy methods.