Adaptive Multicast Membership Management for Mobile Multicast Receivers

IP multicast was initially designed for stationary members and does not consider extra requirements for mobile parties. In fact, to deploy IP multicast, two essential components are required: a membership management protocol to manage the join/leave process, and a routing protocol to build the multicast delivery tree. Currently, multicast membership protocols such as IGMPv3 and MLDv2 rely on a periodic forwarding model between the Querier and the receivers. However, when dealing with mobile IP receivers, the periodic queries prohibit mobile hosts from using sleep mode to conserve battery power when no multicast traffic is present. In addition, the home agent (HA) has to implement the IGMP/MLD forwarding functions, and to tunnel periodically membership messages to all remote mobile receivers, which induces a significant processing overhead. To solve this problem, we propose an adaptive solution in which the HA does not periodically transmit membership messages to mobile receiver. We prove by simulation that our solution reduces significantly the amount of membership messages sent through the mobile IP bi-directional tunnel