Multi-hop multicast listener discovery protocol

Mobile multicast is a research hotspot. While most of the proposed mobile multicast schemes are based on traditional group membership management protocols and concern on the reconstruction of multicast delivery tree by various multicast agent selection algorithms which introduce additional overhead and increase deployment difficult, and they little study the mobile group membership management. In this paper we propose a multi-hop MLD (multicast listener discovery) protocol, which defines different forwarding range based on movement status and sets different hop limit to maintain the multicast status for mobile multicast group members. To evaluate its performance, we set up a simulation platform and compare it with the traditional MLD protocol. The simulation results show that the multi-hop MLD protocol can reduce end-to-end delay and average multicast join delay.