A timer-based mobile multicast routing protocol in mobile networks

Abstract

Mobile computing and multimedia application are two emerging trends in computer systems. Multicasting reduces the amount of multimedia traffics by delivering a single stream of information to many recipients simultaneously. Regarding mobile hosts, however, the naive deployment of existing multicast routing protocols is not a suitable because they implicitly assume static hosts and do not consider the dynamic changes in the location of group members. In this paper, we present a new efficient mobile multicast routing protocol in terms of tree reconstruction overhead, data delivery length, etc. The proposed protocol introduces FMA (Foreign Multicast Agent) for mobile group membership; JOIN, GROUP timer for mobile multicast routing. The periodic join operation by the two timers makes it possible to utilize the characteristic that the mobile multicasting has according to the speed of mobile hosts. Various performance evaluation results illustrate that the proposed protocol shows performance enhancements over existing protocols. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.