Mobility pattern based adaptive mobile multicast algorithm

Mobile IP proposes two approaches to support mobile multicast, which are bidirectional tunneling and remote subscription. The former hides host mobility from all other members of the group so that the multicast tree can remain unchanged, but it introduces the triangle routing problem; the latter provides the shortest routes for the delivery of multicast datagram but at the cost of tree reconstruction. After analyzing the user mobility pattern, an adaptive mobile multicast algorithm based on the mobility pattern is proposed. The mobile host adaptively chooses bidirection tunneling or remote subscription to perform the multicast handoff according to its mobility pattern. When the movement is low, the proposed algorithm optimizes the multicast data transmission with little cost of tree reconstruction, and while the movement is high, it avoids the frequent multicast handoff so as to reduce the tree reconstruction cost.