An analysis of multicast delivery with mobile receivers

The recent and increasing popularity of wireless transmission systems has initiated a strong interest in research on mobile communications. While most of this research effort focuses on unicast communications, there has also been a number of proposals to support multicasting with mobile members. However, the majority of these proposals, despite being innovative and elegant, remain at a research level, i.e. it is not clear if they could realistically be deployed in real large networks. In contrast, the IETF mobile IP working group has outlined two realistic methods that allow mobile nodes to join multicast groups. These proposals have however never been evaluated and compared. This paper therefore presents the results of a large number of simulations in which we have compared the efficiency of the two IETF solutions. We also propose the use of a new extension of the multicast listener delivery (MLD) protocol, which allows to rapidly resume the delivery of multicast data to a mobile receiver that has just performed a handover. The efficiency of this proposal is also compared with the already mentioned solutions of the IETF.