A Novel Mobile Multicast Protocol in IPv6 Networks

Based on dynamic multicast agent, a novel mobile multicast protocol, named TD-DMAMoM (time and distance-aided dynamic multicast agent-based mobile multicast protocol) is presented. In TD-DMAMoM, a fast multicast handover mechanism is used to decrease the multicast interruption time when the mobile node (MN) moves from one foreign network to another. Meanwhile, the proposed protocol tries to provide fast data delivery and low multicast tree reconstruction overhead for high-speed receivers and optimal delivery path for low-speed receivers. During a multicast session in TD-DMANMoM, if a MN enters a new foreign network, the dynamic selection and updating of multicast agent is determined based on the two newly-defined metrics (i.e., time metric t and distance metric d) by the multicast subnet agent. Only when the metrics of both time t and distance d are "True", then the updating of multicast agent will be launched. Simulation results show that TD-DMAMoM has better performance than the other dynamic multicast agent-based protocols, especially in the case where the number of MNs is large.