Improved PMIPv6 handover procedure for consumer multicast traffic

As Internet Protocol (IP) multicast allows the efficient use of network bandwidth for multipoint communication, it is expected to be an essential communication type for delivering multimedia services to mobile nodes (MNs). In this study, the authors address an issue of consumer multicast traffic support in a Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) environment wherein network-based mobility management is deployed for MNs. The recently standardised PMIPv6 multicast listener support provides options for deploying multicast listener functions in a PMIPv6 domain, whereas it does not address specific optimisations and efficiency improvements of multicast routing. The authors first review the PMIPv6 multicast listener support and point out the limitations of the current approach. Then, propose an improved multicast handover procedure that optimises multicastgroup management by utilising the context of consumer´s MN running multicast applications. The authors develop analytical models to evaluate the proposed multicast handover procedure compared with the base one. From the conducted analysis, it is demonstrated that the proposed multicast handover procedure minimises the service interruption time and prevents the multicast packet loss during handovers. Furthermore, in terms of signalling cost consumption, the proposed multicast handover procedure operates on an equal basis with the base one.