IP multicast for mobile hosts

Abstract

We present alternative designs for efficiently supporting multicast for mobile hosts on the Internet. Methods for separately supporting multicasting and mobility along with their possible interactions are briefly described, and then various solutions to the combined problem are explored. We examine three different multicast delivery mechanisms and compare them based on their efficiency and impact on host protocol software. We describe proposals for integrating multicasting and mobility in the Internet architecture. We first present IP extensions for host mobility and other extensions for multicasting. We then examine local multicasting mechanisms, focusing on a group membership protocol that is optimized for wireless point-to-point links. Next, we examine the problems of sending and receiving multicast datagrams in a wide area network. For multicast reception, we describe three alternative proposals and compare them by examining both their applicability and their performance, as well as possible tradeoffs among the two.