An efficient multicast service switching protocol in mobile IP

Abstract

Mobile IP proposes two approaches for supporting mobile multicasting, namely remote subscription (RS) and bi-directional tunneling (BT). In RS the datagrams are delivered in a shortest route but requires the deployment of a multicast router in every visited network where the Mobile Host (MH) may roam. In BT the multicast delivery tree will not be updated when members change locations. However, it suffers from non-optimal delivery path and inefficient usage of network resources because the home agent must replicate and deliver tunneled multicast datagrams to all its MHs in a unicast way. Several multicast routing protocols have been proposed to solve the aforementioned problems such as non-optimal delivery path and frequent reconstruction of a multicast tree. In this paper, we propose a new multicast service switching protocol that not only solves the multicast tree reconstruction and non-optimal delivery path but also improve the existing multicast extension of the Mobile IP to provide transparent service to multicast connections that have been established, without disruption or loss of connection due to MHs moving to another network. Another advantage of our protocol is that the home agent does not need to be a multicast router and does not need to participate in the multicast so as to reduce the control overhead of the network. We evaluated and compared the performance of our approach with the existing protocols by simulation under various environments and we observed a better performance over the existing proposals.