A Mobility-Based Mobile Multicast with Flexible Range

Providing multicast services to mobile hosts in wireless mobile computing is difficult due to dynamic location of the mobile host and dynamic group membership. The current multicast protocol in wired network assumes static hosts, thus it cannot be used directly to mobile computing environments. To solve this problem, several mobile multicast protocols based on Mobile IP have been proposed. Although they provide multicast service to mobile hosts, there are still problems such as tree maintenance overhead due to frequent reconstruction of multicast tree, non-optimal routing path, and service disruption, and so on. In this paper, we propose mobile multicast scheme using variable service range according to the mobility of mobile hosts and resource reservation. We evaluated the proposed scheme comparing with previous schemes by various simulation experiments. The experimental results show improvements of our scheme over previous approaches, namely remote subscription and RBMoM.