Supporting mobile SSM sources for IPv6

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), the IPv6 version of Mobile IP which is currently being developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), is a protocol that describes how a mobile node can change its point of attachment to the Internet. While MIPv6 focuses on unicast communications, it also proposes two basic methods, known as bi-directional tunneling and remote subscription, to handle multicast communications with mobile nodes. In the mean time, the deployment of Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) is of great consideration, mainly for scalability reasons as it is a strong candidate that could be used to support inter-domain multicast routing. In the particular case of mobile IPv6 SSM sources, the mechanisms proposed in MIPv6 to support multicast communications introduce a number of problems that strongly degrade the SSM routing mode of operation. The intend of this document is to describe protocol enhancements that can be used to solve the problems introduced by mobile SSM sources when used with the current version of MIPv6. The extensions, mechanisms and mode of operation of the protocol proposed in this paper are denoted as MSSMSv6 (Mobile SSM Sources for IPv6).