Multicast Handoff Research Articles

A Fast Multicast Handoff Based Hierarchical Mobile Multicast Architecture

Mobile communication is playing an increasing role in our lives. Mobile users expect similar kinds of applications to static ones. Multicast not only brings attractive applications, but also has the benefit of saving scarce bandwidth in wireless environment. It would be fruitful to combine these two technologies. This paper proposes a framework to provide multicast in mobile environment called Fast Multicast Handoff Based Hierarchical Mobile Multicast Architecture (FHMM). It uses a hierarchical mobile multicast architecture to isolate the local movement from outside, and improve the stability of the main multicast delivery tree. It introduces a fast multicast handoff mechanism which can reduce handoff latency and packet loss rate for inter-domain handoff and intra-domain handoff. Furthermore, FHMM is a universal solution because it can still work even if the access network does not support multicast. Simulation results show that FHMM is effective with low packet loss rate, high multicast packet

FAMH: Fast Inter-Subnet Multicast Handoff Method for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

When a mobile node that subscribes to one or more multicast groups moves to another subnet, it is essential to provide a network level multicast handoff mechanism. Previous multicast handoff schemes are based on Mobile IP. However it is known that the Mobile IP is not adequate to interactive multimedia applications such as voice over IP or video conferencing due to its large handoff delay. Additionally, few researches have paid attentions on multicast handoff in infrastructure-mode WLAN environment. This paper proposes a fast inter-subnet multicast handoff method in Mobile IP based infrastructure-mode IEEE 802.11 WLAN environment. We introduce a dedicated Multicast Access Point (MAP) that works with an access points specified in standard IEEE 802.11 WLAN in order to alleviate disruption of receiving multicast datagram. Unlike previous research, our scheme does not modify Mobile IP specifications. MAP detects the completion of link-layer handoff, sends unsolicited IGMP Membership report to its local router on behalf of the mobile station and performs unicast tunneling. We evaluate the proposed method using ns-2 simulation. The simulation result shows that the proposed method can reduce the disruption period due to inter-subnet multicast handoff to about 1/12 and the packet loss rate can be reduced to about 1/4 over 20-size multicast group compared with the standard Mobile IP based IEEE 802.11 WLAN.

Multicast Handoff Agent Mechanism for All-IP Mobile Network

This paper proposes a mechanism called a Multicast Handoff Agent (MHA) to reduce handoff latency for IP multicast. The MHA acts as a proxy for the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) of mobile nodes and keeps information for members of multicast groups in a cell. When a mobile node moves to other cell, the MHA immediately sends unsolicited reports without waiting for the IGMP query. In addition, our mechanism may conserve battery power since it does not need to reply to a query.The mechanism is evaluated through simulation and analysis and compared with the IGMPv2 for mobility and IGMP traffic. Simulation results show that handoff latency can be largely reduced and the IGMP control traffic can be eliminated on the wireless links during the duration of membership.

Multicast handoff agent scheme for micro-mobility in all-IP wireless network

For micro-mobility of multicast group members in an all-IP wireless network, a new scheme has been proposed to reduce the join delay by eliminating the waiting time of the Query message and the random backoff time. Analytical and simulation results show that the scheme offers a much shorter join delay than the existing scheme, especially for a sparse group.