Multicast for mobile hosts in IP networks: progress and challenges

In the past few years, multimedia applications have become very popular on the Internet, and a growing number of users have shown interest in this type of communications. IP multicasting has logically been considered to support such transmissions, mainly because its inherent nature is to efficiently minimize the bandwidth required to deliver multimedia data to a large set of targeted receivers. In the meantime, there has been a steady increase in the number of mobile wireless devices connected to the Internet. It has also clearly appeared that mobile Internet users will expect to have access to the services and applications available in traditional wired networks, and these services will surely include multimedia applications. Consequently, many efforts are being made to provide efficient mobility and multicasting support, and to bring the two together in the next generation of IP networks.