Balancing resource consumption and handover delay for multicast mobility

For mobile multicast, seamless handover and efficient network resource utilization should be achieved together. IP multicast protocol, however, lacks efficient mobility support as it is originally designed for wired networks. Meanwhile, Mobile-IP protocol can provide seamless mobility, but it is designed for unicast communication. Largely, there exist three solutions to glue these two protocols: Bi-directional Tunneling (BT), the Remote subscription (RS), and PMIP-M. The performance of the three existing approaches varies depending on the circumstance. In this paper, we proposed a scheme for a mobile multicast support that combines three existing approaches. Our scheme estimates the performance of these three approaches at run time, and chooses the best approach for the given circumstance. The selection decision is made upon each handover by balancing handover delay and resource consumption. Another key novelty of our scheme is that we accept performance target with respect to handover delay and resource consumption. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by extensive simulations.