Design And Implementation Of A Manageable IPv6 Wireless Multicast Platform

Wireless Network has entered an era of quick development recent years. Wi-Fi hot spots are deployed all over the world, along with the quick improvement of performance of mobile devices and reduction in cost. The number of the mobile users is becoming so fast that content & service providers become more and more interested in multicast communications based on wireless network.As a more efficient group communication method, IP multicast can deliver data to a group of end-users with less resource consumption. IP multicast can be very useful in helping multimedia applications, such as: distant education, mobile commerce, multi-user online game and video delivering deploying in bandwidth limited wireless network. So far, almost all multicast platforms and testbeds are developed to serve the research goals, which mainly focus on multicast routing protocols and/or specific multicast applications. Therefore, there's a gap between these platforms and testbeds and the requirement of reality. The reason for this is that these platforms and testbeds lack of management support of multicast IP assignment, multicast session and other demands such as authorization and authentication of connected users.In this paper, we propose the prototype of a Manageable IPv6 Wireless Multicast Platform (MWMP6). MWMP6 uses its special centralized management solution to handle multicast address allocation and scheduling. Combined with multicast session directory and other modules, MWMP6 provides management functionalities for multicast address, multicast session and multicast content. Besides, security issue like user authentication is also taken in count. MWMP6 can support various typical wireless multicast applications under wireless network environment. The experiment result shows that MWMP6 is capable to serve wireless multicast in Wireless LAN.