Seamless multicast mobility support using fast MIPv6 extensions

This paper elaborates on seamless handover support for wireless IP multicast networks with the use of a novel mobility management mechanism. The latter enables mobile nodes with active multicast sessions to execute seamless remote subscriptions while changing their network attachment point and is formulated by extending the unicast ‘‘Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6’’ protocol (FMIPv6). The proposed scheme minimizes service disruption due to handover, by using conditional tunneling of multicast traffic on a per flow (rather than per mobile node) basis. Moreover, a simple buffering technique is proposed, enabling the temporary storage of the tunneled before the handover packets thus eliminating packet loss occurring during the link layer handover period. Also, multicast traffic recipients experience reduced handover latency due to the timely configuration of the network routers providing the multicast service. The performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated by OPNET simulation results, for realistic IEEE 802.11 WLAN indoor simulation scenarios, incorporating spatially correlated shadowing for the propagation environment and random mobility of users. Performance results are provided in terms of service disruption time perceived by video streaming recipients as well as tunneling and buffering overhead for handover support, while varying the FMIPv6 protocol triggering configuration, the inter-domain distance and the access router buffering capacity. The performance evaluation reveals a significant reduction in the handover packet loss level when compared to similar multicast mobility schemes, causing a slight increase of resource consumption for tunneling and buffering purposes. 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.