An approach to enhance mobile multicast using context transfer

With the advent of the handheld devices and multimedia applications, there has been an increasing interest for mobile multicast. IETF proposes two approaches. The first approach is bi-directional tunneling (BT), where the mobile node subscribes to a multicast group through its home network. The second approach is in remote subscription (RS), where the mobile node joins the multicast group via a local multicast router on the foreign link being visited. However, in BT approach the home agent is typical far and this will lead to high signaling cost at the same time the home agent represents a single point of failure and introduces scalability issues. RS approach suffers mainly from frequent tree reconstruction. The main aim for this paper is to propose a new mobile multicast approach to reduce the signaling cost and reduce the packet loss especially in case of macromibiliy. The proposed solution integrates hierarchical mobile IPv6 with mobile context transfer. This paper presents and evaluates the proposed solution. Our results shows that compared to BT approach, the proposed solution gives lower signaling cost.