Source Mobility Support for Source Specific Multicast in Satellite Networks

With increasing human mobility and demand for ubiquitous communications, the growth for satellite communications is likely to continue. Recently, IP multicast support over satellites has witness significant increases. Mobility support for multicast receivers as well as sources within a global multi-beam satellite network is very important. Not much research has been done on this area compared to IP multicast mobility support in the Internet. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism to support multicast source mobility for Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) based applications in a multi-beam mesh satellite network with receivers both within the satellite network and in the Internet. In the proposed mechanism, the mobile source remains transparent to the various SSM receivers at all times despite the fact that its IP address keeps on changing as it changes its point of attachment from one satellite gateway (GW) to another. The uniqueness about this proposal is the absence of encapsulation (tunnelling) and triangular routing paths throughout the system and its compliance with DVB-RCS/S2 specifications. Keywords-SSM; Mobile Multicast Source; Transparent Satellite; Multi-beam Satellite Interactive Network.