Mobility and quality of service in wireless multicast infrastructure

This paper defines a new wireless mobility architecture with quality of service (QoS) that uses the fixed network infrastructure for group communication. The mobile core-based tree (M-CBT) architecture uses multicast to provide fast handoff and reduce network utilization costs for group communication. The M-CBT architecture can be coupled with a multicast QoS routing protocol to provide QoS for mobile communication. The explore best path message (EBPM) protocol is a probe- based dynamic distributed multicast QoS routing protocol that is designed to quickly search the network for an optimal QoS path from a joining node to the multicast tree. This paper illustrates how mobile devices using M-CBT and EBPM can participate in group communications and quickly find a QoS path as they handoff to a new network.