Performance evaluation of a multicast-based solution for wireless resources discovery

An improved IP network service (e.g., for real time services) is expected in the near future in both wired and wireless environments. In this regard, handover capabilities are extremely important and challenging, in particular if their use in operation must be seamless. One of the main steps to achieve seamless handover is the quick discovery of the IP addresses and service capabilities of candidate access routers to hand over to. We present a push-mode-multicast based solution to discover and update timely information about wireless resources. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of signaling burden and discovery time with respect to solutions already presented in the literature.