Mobility of sources and listeners: real-time support of multicast services

摘要

In today’s Internet there is an increasing demand for group-based multimedia sessions, such as video/audio conferencing, IPTV, push media. Moreover, there is an increasing trend for mobile communications, with large network dynamic events, which require fast resilience to keep, as much as possible, sessions alive over time. In this sense, the bandwidth-constrained data transport scheme of IP multicast allows traffic optimization throughout the network. However, current IP multicast support over mobile communications is not efficient, mainly due to the IP addressing scheme and mobility. If multicast sources mobility is taken into account, then the performance of IP multicast is significantly degraded, due to the requirement for constantly changing the overall multicast tree.