A channel-manageable IP multicast support framework for distributed mobility management

As the rapid increase of Internet traffic is becoming a serious problem, mobile Internet networks are moving towards flat architectures. Distributed mobility management (DMM) is expected to be one of the key technologies tackling the problem by distributing the data traffic concentrated on a centralized anchor to different access routers. For deploying IP multicasting on mobile networks, a Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD) Proxy is generally considered due to its lightweight feature compared to multicast routing protocols. Following DMM requirements being defined in IETF, an upstream interface of MLD Proxy on an access router is basically fixed towards mobile node (MN)´s anchor to keep the mobility state with unicast session in the same entity. It causes unnecessary multicast traffic due to multiple tunnels established with several access routers for common multicast channel so that this runs counter to the objective of the DMM. In this paper, we propose a channel-manageable IP multicast framework for distributed mobility management, called (CM-DMM), managing of all the multicast channels on Mobility Access Routers (MARs) and the control of which channel should be local or remote. We confronted the performance of CM-DMM against DMM with fixed MLD upstream decision towards each MN´s mobility anchor, in terms of duplicate channels and traffic according to the MNs´ movement and channel locality ratio. Simulation results demonstrate that CM-DMM is effective to highly reduce unnecessary multicast traffic relatively to DMM with fixed MLD upstream decision. Additional performance factors of CM-DMM are discussed, as well as considerations for its practical deployment in multicast/broadcast networks.