A multicast routing protocol for group communications in cellular IP networks

In this paper, a novel location management scheme called distributed group tracking (DGT) for group communications in cellular IP networks is proposed. In DGT, base stations track each member of a group and build a share multicast routing tree called DGT-tree for the group in a distributed manner. Transmission of multicast packets among group members is along the group's DGT-tree. Simulation study has demonstrated that a better performance can be achieved by DGT over the gateway-based counterpart in terms of transmission cost as well as link load balance.