Mobility of sources and listeners in IP multicast-enabled networks

Abstract

In today’s Internet, it can be noticed the increasing demand for group-based multimedia sessions, such as video/audio conferencing, IPTV, push media. Moreover, there is an increasing trend for mobile communications, with large network dynamic events, which require fast resilience to keep, as much as possible, sessions alive over time. In this sense, the bandwidth-constrained data transport scheme of IP multicast allows traffic optimization throughout the network. However, current IP multicast support over mobile communications is not efficient, mainly due to the IP addressing scheme and mobility. If multicast sources mobility is taken into account, then the performance of IP multicast is significantly degraded, due to the requirement for constantly changing the overall multicast tree. In this paper we propose a new solution for agent-based multicast in both sources and listeners mobile environments, called Multicast Teleport (MUTE), which considers the existence of anchor points in the network that provide proxy features, assuming the view of multicast data source inside the network, and establishing independence between listeners and sources movements. MUTE was evaluated in NS-2, and the results show that it is able to provide both multicast sources and listeners mobility with decreased disruption time and increased network performance.