Mobility of sources and listeners: real-time support of multicast services

Abstract

In today's Internet there is an increasing demand for group-based multimedia sessions, such as video/audio conferencing, IPTV, push media. Moreover, there is an increasing trend for mobile communications, with large network dynamic events, which require fast resilience to keep, as much as possible, sessions alive over time. In this sense, the bandwidth-constrained data transport scheme of IP multicast allows traffic optimization throughout the network. However, current IP multicast support over mobile communications is not efficient, mainly due to the IP addressing scheme and mobility. If multicast sources mobility is taken into account, then the performance of IP multicast is significantly degraded, due to the requirement for constantly changing the overall multicast tree. In this paper we propose a new solution for agent-based multicast in both sources and listeners mobile environments, called MUlticast TEleport (MUTE). MUTE considers the existence of anchor points in the network that provide proxy features, assuming the view of multicast data source inside the network, and establishing independence between listeners and sources movements. Moreover, we propose MUTE extension to efficiently support time-sensitive sessions, which consists in integrating IEEE 802.21 and QoS-aware abstracted transport approach, to allow media independent transport with fast resilience support. The evaluation of MUTE was carried out in NS-2, and the results show that it is able to provide both multicast sources and listeners mobility with decreased disruption time and increased network performance in heterogeneous systems.