SMARTNET: An Efficient Multicast Architecture for IP-Based Mobile Convergence Networks

We propose a novel multicast architecture named SMARTNET in this paper. On deploying the legacy multicast routing protocols to mobile core networks, there are some efficiency issues including traffic overhead from unnecessary sources, heavy group control messages, and performance degradation of multicast routers by large amount of multicast session states. Since SMARTNET uses stateless multicast mechanism based on XCast, it does not need to maintain multicast session states and there is no heavy control overhead like flooding after prune of DVMRP. It can dramatically reduce multicast packet overhead from unnecessary sources by means of source filtering. And light-weight multicast group control protocol of SMARTNET is designed to have interoperability with IGMPv3 from mobile nodes. Finally we evaluate and approve the performance of the proposed architecture with well-designed network simulations.