A Hierarchical Mobile Multicast Protocol Based On MIP-RS & MobiCast

With the development of mobile communication and the rapidly increasing number of Internet users, more and more people hope to access Internet by a mobile terminal in a wireless way while moving, in order to acquire the needed information, and also expect similar kinds of applications to static ones. Moving frequently of a mobile node and saving scarce bandwidth in wireless environment is a bottleneck problem in the development of mobile communication. 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. So the combination of mobile IP and multicast attracts more and more attentions. Some mobile multicast protocols were researched and analyzed, and the existing problems were pointed out. We propose a novel hierarchical mobile multicast protocol based on MIP-RS & MobiCast. It uses a hierarchical mobile multicast architecture to isolate the local movement from outside, and improves the stability of the main multicast delivery tree. Also it introduces a fast multicast handoff mechanism which can reduce handoff latency and packet loss rate for inter-domain handoff and intra-domain handoff. Simulation results show that this is effective with low packet loss rate, high multicast packet delivery efficiency and little multicast maintenance overhead.