Mobile multicast scheme in multi-homing environment

Abstract

Mobile multicast can provide various services with the development of wireless and mobile technologies. While the current mobile multicast schemes mostly provide the mobile multicast services for signal interface based mobile nodes which has the limited service capacity and may result in service disruption and packet loss. Recently, more mobile devices begin to equip multiple network interfaces to attach to multiple networks at the same time (called multi-homing mobile node). To support the mobile multicast services for multi-homing mobile node attached to the multiple heterogeneous networks, we propose a multiple network interfaces based mobile multicast scheme called the multi-homing mobile multicast (MMoM) scheme in this paper. The MMoM scheme consists of the multiple interfaces management, multicast flow distribution policy and mobile multicast handover mechanisms, and it can provide seamless mobile multicast services. To evaluate the performance of MMoM scheme, we set up a test-bed and implement MMoM in our test-bed. The experimental results show that the MMoM scheme improves the performance of multicast handover and reduces the service disruption time compared with the single network interface based mobile multicast schemes.