Analysis and optimization of a transparent multicast mobility support in cellular systems

We review a multicast mobility support for cellular systems acting in a transparent way. The support is by means of multicast agents placed at each base station. This architecture makes a prediction about user movements and performs a resource reservation in advance, where the multicast tree creation is made before the radio handover. We propose a simple analytical model useful to compute the two basic performance indexes: the handover latency and the resource utilization time. This analysis has been used to set the optimal threshold parameters involved in the multicast and radio handovers.