An efficient mobile multicast mechanism for fast handovers: A study from design and implementation in experimental networks

There have been many research efforts to solve the problem of providing IP multicast to mobile nodes (MNs). However, the issue of minimizing the packet losses and the multicast service disruption period during handovers are relatively given little concerns or even neglected. In this paper, we discuss the possible multicast subscription approaches in FMIPv6 to reduce the packet losses during handovers. Then, we propose an efficient multicast support mechanism for FMIPv6, which is derived from the consideration of the advantages and drawbacks of the discussed multicast subscription approaches. Two versions of the proposed protocol, both of which operate in the context of FMIPv6 handovers, are introduced. The first version is designed to minimize the required modification to the existing FMIPv6 stack, while the second version is designed to eliminate inefficiencies that exist in the first version allowing some modifications to the existing protocol stacks. To evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol, we have implemented the proposed protocol in real systems and conducted an extensive set of experiments in a multicast enabled experimental network. The performance of the proposed protocol in terms of scalability is also examined by simulation study. The experiment and simulation results show that the proposed protocol achieves good performance in terms of the number of packet losses, multicast service disruption period, traffic incurred by multicast packet delivery, and delivery path length.