TITLE: SCALABLE ROUTING ALGORITHMS FOR ENABLING MOBILE IPv6 SOURCE SPECIFIC MULTICAST

SUMMARY IPv6, designed with the success and prior experience of IPv4, will potentially reach into larger spheres of devices, networks and overall means of communications. Employing the Internet infrastructure and protocols, communications will not be limited between traditional computer devices but will penetrate into a plethora of devices from personal voice, video and organisational hand-helds to simple household gadgets. Multicasting has always been incorporated as an important feature in IPv6 to provide broadcast-like services to Internet devices. Multicast enables a scalable and global broadcast function for multimedia applications by eliminating the need for equivalent increase in bandwidth. It provides a cheap, efficient and easy way of employing the Internet as a broadcasting medium without the constraints of transmitters and government licensing. Multicast is particularly important for wireless networks where operating frequency bands are shared between users and bandwidth is constrained. The problem with the existing Any Source Multicast specification is that the multicast tree rooted at the RP results in a single point of failure. The necessity of multicast data to travel from the source via the RP to the receiving node is not optimal and leads to a situation commonly known as triangular routing. This presentation will briefly go through the proposal to alleviate these problems by employing SSM as specified by the IETF. This negates the need for an RP to be implemented and MSDP configured, which eliminates most of the complexities associated with multicast deployment. There is also no concise understanding of multicast protocol implementation and behaviour for mobile nodes. We aim to determine scalable algorithms and protocols for multicast routing that support fixed and mobile hosts, and investigate their performance and efficiency. We will employ simulation techniques using OMNeT ++ to find the protocol efficiency with varying mobility, bandwidth, receiver densities and multimedia applications.