A framework for handling multicast source movement over mobile IP

Previous proposals to provide multicasting over mobile IP focus mainly on recipient mobility and little attention has been given to the case when the mobile host (MH) is also the source. In this paper, we have attempted to address the case when the MH is a source as well as a recipient of a given multicast session and more than one source is participating in the session. The basic essence of the problem is that the effect of receiver movement on the multicast tree is local while it may be global for source movement and it may affect the complete multicast delivery tree. We have used a MH initiated approach for multicast handoff and introduced a unified solution and made the effect of the MH movement local, irrespective of whether it is working as a source or a recipient of a multicast group. We examine and compare our proposed approach to existing approaches by simulating under various traffic environments and we observe an improved performance.