Mobility support for IP Multicast

Multicast and mobility are two important research topics in the Internet nowadays. Although much research has been done in these two areas, mobility support for IP multicast still remains a problem. Most Internet protocols work well only when the hosts are static. Research on mobility support has so far been focused on the unicast case. Mobility support for IP unicast (Mobile IP) mainly aims at solving the location independent routing problem. Unlike IP unicast, IP multicast routing protocols are inherently location independent. The major problems that mobility brings to IP multicast are the packet loss and the traffic latency when handover happens, which are very critical for real time multicast applications. In this proposal, we discuss the deficiency of several IP multicast related protocols in terms of mobility support, and propose a new agent-based network architecture that can help to achieve seamless mobility. We use the Mobility Support Agent (MSA) to eliminate the possible disturbance that is triggered by a handover procedure. This architecture is designed in such a way that it can hide the details of the handover from being noticed by the applications running in the mobile hosts and the multicast related protocols running in the networks. One of the main methods is to process the multicast related protocols' messages in advance of the handover, e.g., pre-register to the multicast group in the neighboring network. Besides the seamless mobility support, this agent-based architecture can also support the movement detection and prediction, reliable multicast, group dynamics analysis, etc. Several protocols running among the mobile hosts and the MSAs need to be designed. Bandwidth efficiency and mobile host power consumption are the two major concerns for the protocol design.