Abstract
Multicast delivery in heterogeneous wireless networks requires careful coordination, in order to take full advantage of the resources such an interworking network environment can offer. Effective coordination, however, may require interworking signaling from coordinating network entities to receivers of a multicast service. Scalable delivery of such signaling is of great importance, since a large number of receivers may be interested in a multicast service. This paper therefore investigates the use of a multicast signaling channel (MSCH) to carry such interworking signaling in a scalable manner. Applications of interworking signaling for multicast service delivery in heterogeneous wireless networks are presented, motivating the need for an MSCH. Then a comparative study is performed analysing potential benefits of employing an MSCH for signaling message delivery compared to conventional unicast signaling. The analysis reveals that the benefits of the MSCH depend mainly on the selection of an appropriate signaling network to carry the MSCH and also on efficient addressing of a subset of receivers within the MSCH. Based on the findings, guidelines for the selection of a suitable signaling network are provided. Furthermore a novel approach is proposed that allows efficient addressing of a subset of receivers within a multicast group. The approach minimizes the required signaling load on the MSCH by reducing the size of the required addressing information. This is achieved by an aggregation of receivers with common context information. To demonstrate the concept, a prototype of the MSCH has been developed and is presented in the paper.
Published Version
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