Seamless multicast handover in PMIPv6-based wireless networks

In this paper we propose the three schemes to support seamless multicast handover in the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) based wireless networks. In the existing scheme, there is a problem of packet loss and larger handover latency, in which Mobile Node (MN) cannot receive the multicast data packets until the new Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) completes the Proxy Binding Update with Local Mobility Anchor (LMA). In this paper, we propose the packet forwarding schemes for multicast handover to reduce the packet losses and handover delay, among which the first two schemes are for intra-LMA domain handover and the other one is for inter-LMA domain handover. To evaluate the proposed schemes, we performed the numerical analysis to compare the proposed scheme with the existing schemes in terms of the signaling overhead associated with multicast handover. From the analysis, it is shown that the proposed scheme can provide relatively small signaling costs, compared to the existing schemes.