Multicast Extension to Proxy Mobile IPv6 for Mobile Multicast Services

Abstract

Recently, Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has received much attention as a mobility management protocol in next-generation all-IP mobile networks. While the current research related to PMIPv6 mainly focuses on providing efficient handovers for unicast-based applications, there has been relatively little interest in supporting multicast services with PMIPv6. To provide support for multicast services with PMIPv6, there are two alternative approaches called Mobile Access Gateway (MAG)-based subscription and Local Mobility Anchor (LMA)-based subscription. However, MAG-based subscription causes a large overhead for multicast joining and LMA-based subscription provides non-optimal multicast routing paths. The two approaches may also cause a high packet loss rate. In this paper, we propose an efficient PMIPv6-based multicast protocol that aims to provide an optimal delivery path for multicast data and to reduce handover delay and packet loss rate. Through simulation studies, we found that the proposed protocol outperforms existing multicast solutions for PMIPv6 in terms of end-to-end delay, service disruption period, and the number of lost packets during handovers.