Supporting mobile multicast in mobile networks by considering host mobility

Abstract

Mobile computing and multimedia application are two emerging trends in computer systems. 'Multicast' reduces the number of multimedia traffics by delivering a single stream of information to thousands of recipients simultaneously. Since multicast routing protocols being used in a wired network were originally designed for stationary host, they do not consider the dynamic location changes of mobile hosts. Therefore, the naive deployment of existing multicast routing protocols is not suitable. In this paper, we present a new mobile multicast routing protocol. The proposed protocol uses Foreign Multicast Agent (FMA) to maintain the group membership. The service range defined by the timer of a mobile host may efficiently take advantage of the characteristics that mobile multicast has according to the speed of mobile hosts. Various performance evaluation results illustrate that the proposed protocol shows distinct performance enhancements over existing protocols.