An Enhanced Multicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Hosts in IP Networks

Abstract

Conventional multicast routing protocols in IP networks are not suitable for mobile environments since they assume static hosts when building a multicast delivery tree. In this paper, we propose a multicast routing protocol to provide an efficient multicasting service to mobile hosts in IP networks. The main purpose of the proposed protocol is to reduce both the multicast tree reconstruction number and multicast service disruption time. The proposed multicast routing protocol is a hybrid method using the advantages of the bidirectional tunneling and the remote subscription proposed by the IETF Mobile IP working group. The proposed protocol supports the maximum tunneling service satisfying with the maximum tolerable transfer delay time. The simulation results show that the proposed protocol has better performance in the multicast tree reconstruction number and the multicast service disruption time than the previous protocols do.