Multicast Routing in Internet with Mobile Hosts

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the problems of providing multicast routing to mobile hosts in mobile computing environments. In such an environment, the main challenge of multicast routing is group member mobility. We propose a heuristic multicast routing algorithm that aims at delivering multicast packets efficiently and reduces multicast latency. The key idea of our approach is to set up an efficiently multicast tree rooted at the home network of the source and to adjust the tree ac- cording to the current locations of other group members. To reduce reconstruction overhead of the multicast tree, we eliminate the reconstruction overhead caused by frequently to-and-fro movements of group members between networks by using Mobile IP tunneling. In addition, we use a local multicast routing mechanism that only delivers multicast packets to the base stations that group members currently dwell and their surrounding base stations instead of all base stations in a local network. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms a well known method by reducing 9% - 79% join time and 9% - 60% multicast latency as mobility increases, and causes less than 14% reconstruction overhead.