Supporting Mobile streaming services in future publish/subscribe networks

The architecture of the current Internet was not originally designed to support either mobility or multicast. In particular, its coupling of host identification and location identification has hindered the provision of effective mobile services. At the same time, its lack of support for multicast distribution causes a multitude of redundant unicast transmissions, leading to an inefficient utilization of network resources. Both these limitations are especially apparent in the case of real-time continuous media distribution. The publish/subscribe paradigm has been proposed as a promising alternative to the current send/receive paradigm for a future Internet architecture. In future publish/subscribe networks, multicast will be the norm, and this change of the end-to-end communication semantics will lead to a networking environment more suitable for mobility. In the context of this paradigm, this paper considers a prototype architecture based on the Scribe overlay multicast scheme. Preliminary simulation results show that our publish/subscribe network implementation achieves better performance during mobility compared to Mobile IPv6 in all relevant metrics, such as hand-off delay (or resume time) and loss of real-time traffic during disconnections, at the cost of a slight increase of the end-to-end delay due to the routing stretch imposed by the overlay.