An efficient multicast mechanism for data loss prevention

The various multicast routing methods that have been proposed so far are classified into two classes: home agent (HA) based multicast routing and foreign agent (FA) based multicast routing. But HA based multicast routing has problem in that it does not provide the optimal route. FA based multicast routing also has the problem in that it requires the frequent reconstruction of the multicast tree. In this paper, we propose the FA based hierarchical multicast routing method, in which the network is managed hierarchically. The proposed method uses the FA based multicast routing in order to guarantee the optimal route and uses the hierarchical topology to decrease the frequency of reconstruction of multicast tree. The proposed method also tries to speedup the handoff by using the mobile IPv4 low latency handoff and by executing the L3 handoff before the L2 handoff is completed. And, it tries to solve the multicast data loss by using the adaptive buffering mechanism in gateway or nFA (new foreign agent) according to the existence of multicast members in the new foreign network.