Research On Multicast In Mobile IP And Its Implementation

Mobile computing is the ability to access data at anytime, anywhere, and the communication should not be interrupted while the node is moving. As an important trend of mobile computing technology, wireless communication has attracted much attention during the recent years. When new access devices, new types of service and new consumers are keeping emerging, the demand of wireless application has increased tremendously. Mobile IP can provide people the convenience to access the Internet during roaming, and it has been accepted by the 3G wireless communication standard IMT2000 as the datagram service protocol. Mobile IP is the deep integration of mobile computing technology and the IP datagram protocol. The mobility extension of IPv4 protocol has been finished and IETF has released correspondent RFC documents. Because of its huge IP address space and some other advantages, IPv6 is destined to replace IPv4. Now the standard of Mobile IPv6 is under working and the official documents will be released in the near future.Multicasting is an efficient method to deliver data to a group of receivers. The routers transmit a copy of datagram on each branch of the multicast delivery tree, which can greatly reduce the bandwidth cost. Multicast is very important for some new emerging applications such as distance learning, video conference and IP TV. The existing multicast protocols used on Internet implicitly assume static hosts when constructing multicast delivery tree, such as PIM, CBT, and etc. They do not consider the existence of mobile hosts. Providing multicast support in mobile environment is a challenging and promising work, as the number of mobile hosts in Internet is increasing rapidly.This thesis will discuss how to provide multicast service in Mobile IP and related research topics, including the introduction of Mobile IP, representative mobile multicast protocols and reliable mobile multicast protocols, a new mobile multicast protocol-Region Subscription Mobile Multicast Protocol (ReSMMP) and its reliable mobile multicast extension.This thesis is organized as follows. The first chapter is a briefly introduction of Mobile IP. Then the difference between Mobile IPv6 and Mobile IPv4 is presented. The second chapter discusses the multicast protocols provided in Mobile IP drafts. Some other mobile multicast protocols and reliable mobile multicast protocols are also discussed. In chapter three, we present the Region Subscription Mobile Multicast Protocol. The next chapter is about the implementation of ReSMMP in Linux kernel. How to add reliable multicast features in ReSMMP is studied in chapter five. Chapter six presents the demo system of these two new protocols. Chapter seven concludes this thesis.