Multicast Mobility in Heterogeneous Technologies: Experimental Validation

The convergence of services and technologies has been driven by service and network providers with the aim to develop a unified infrastructure. From the services side, we have multimedia through unicast, multicast and broadcast services. From the technologies side, we have wired and wireless technologies, including unidirectional technologies such as Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB). These trends allied to the increasing mobility and QoS demands, introduce strong requirements to future telecommunication networks. This paper presents an innovative approach to handle multicast services in a heterogeneous networks environment, including broadcast technologies. The presented architecture aims at guaranteeing end-to-end QoS in mobile scenarios, efficiently handling the underlying network resources and integrating the emerging broadcast technologies. This architecture was developed in a real environment with mobility of multicast sessions through heterogeneous technologies, Wi-Fi and DVB, using also Wi-Fi as a return channel. The results show that the architecture is able to support the seamless mobility of users receiving multicast sessions, with low degradation on the running communications.