Multicast Source Mobility Support Schemes in PMIPv6 Networks

Providing IP multicast to Mobile Nodes has drawn significant attention and so far many approaches have been proposed. However, current mobile multicast schemes mainly focus on the multicast receiver mobility support based on the host-based mobility management protocol. Recent work has shown that ensuring service connectivity for mobile multicast sources is a challenging issue and is still largely open. With the rapid development of the network-based mobility solution, multicast source mobility support schemes in Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) networks are needed urgently. In this paper, a base solution (BS) and a direct multicast routing scheme (DMRS) are proposed for multicast source mobility in PMIPv6 networks. In order to transmit multicast data through the PMIPv6 tunnel, we adopt the Multicast Listener Discover (MLD) Proxy function in the BS. In the DMRS, locally optimized routing for traffic flows can be provided. The performance of the proposed schemes is evaluated by theoretical analysis and implementation. These results show that our proposed schemes outperform the previous solutions in terms of the signaling cost and the BS has lower multicast handover delay than the DMRS.