Multicast Extension Support for Proxy MIPv6

Mobile multicast becomes a research hotspot with the development of wireless and mobile technologies, and it is based on the traditional multicast protocols and mobility management protocols to provide the multicast services for mobile subscribers. Several mobile multicast methods were proposed in the past few years, but most of them are based on the mobile IPv6 and its alternatives which require the mobile hosts to support the mobility function. Recently, the proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) was proposed to provide the mobility support for mobile node with or without mobility involvement, and the previous studies have shown that the PMIPv6 can improve the handover performance. However, the PMIPv6 mainly concerns on the unicast routing support and little considers the multicast routing. In this paper, we study the multicast support in PMIPv6 and propose two multicast methods called the MAG (mobile access gateway)-based method and LMA (local mobility anchor)-based method, and analyze their performance under different scenarios. The analytical results show that the LMA-based method is suitable for the bigger PMIPv6 domain, and larger network topology scenarios (more than 10⁵), whereas the MAG-based method is used for the smaller PMIPv6 domain.