An integrated platform for multicast, reliable multicast and quality of service support in the regional registration mobile-IP environment

The standard based Mobile-IP protocol allows IP hosts to keep an active communication session, while moving between different networks. The regional registration Mobile-IP approach was introduced to reduce the overhead associated with the location registration process. The scalability features, associated with the regional registration Mobile-IP, qualify it as a deployment candidate to support mobility in IP networks.; A wide variety of applications, such as teleconferencing and video-on-demand type of services, will utilize IP multicast for traffic delivery. Providing an efficient system that supports IP multicast, reliable delivery, and differentiated quality of service is a challenge for systems providing mobility support.; Although few approaches were proposed to support such services in environments that support mobility, applicability to the Mobile-IP regional registration environment has not been addressed yet. Since those proposed approaches may not work, or will not perform efficiently in the regional registration environment, providing an efficient solution to support multicast and reliable multicast delivery becomes a critical issue. In addition, the regional registration operation exhibits strong sensitivity to failure of mobility agents. To tolerate failure events, an efficient fault recovery scheme is needed, such that service disruption is minimized.; In this work we propose an integrated platform that supports IP multicast and reliable multicast in the Mobile-IPv4 regional environment. A robust procedure to recover from mobility agents failure events is described. In addition, we illustrate a platform extension to provide quality of service support based on the DiffServ model. The proposed schemes take advantage of the inherent characteristics of the regional registration environment, providing the intended functions with minimum additional overhead. A unique feature of this platform is that the support for those services, traditionally treated separately, is integrated with the control domain of the regional registration basic platform. This integration provides a very attractive set of features, such as the reuse of existing control data structures and control messages. The suggested integrated platform shows strong scalability features against the number of mobile nodes and mobility rates. Also, this platform tolerates the dynamics associated with the multicast group membership and the QoS requirements in an environment that supports mobility.