Core Network Impact on Multicast Service in Cellular Networks

Advance resource reservation approaches can represent optimal solutions to overcome the handover latency due to the users mobility, thus guarantying the requested quality of service (QoS). An important issue is to define the precise lead time needed for performing the resource reservation, in order to assure the multicast service during user mobility. That lead time takes into account two types of time delays; the first being the delay introduced by the radio handover procedure, and the second being the multicast handover. In this paper we investigate the multicast handover delay, that is mainly related to the characteristics of the core network. In particular we present statistical results related to the delay, jitter and dropping probability of the multicast data packets in three different scenarios.