A new multicasting-based architecture for Internet host mobility

Abstract

IP multicasting provides a mechanism for location independent addressing and packet delivery to a group of hosts that belong to a multicast group. It also provides efficient mechanisms for hosts to join and leave multicast groups. The problem of supporting macro and micro level host mobility in the Internet involves similar issues of location independent addressing, address translation, packet forwarding and location management of mobile hosts. In order to exploit the commonality of goals in the two problems, we have investigated a new approach for supporting host mobility using IP multicasting as the sole mechanism for addressing and routing packets to mobile hosts. Mobile hosts are identified by unique multicast IP addresses, and use the IP multicasting infrastructure to route packets destined for mobile hosts. We have implemented a mobile computing environment which uses this routing approach, and our performance analysis shows that it is very effective in supporting seamless mobili...