Design, Implementation, and Performance Evaluation of Efficient PMIPv6 Based Mobile Multicast Sender Support Schemes

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is proposed as a promising network-based mobility management protocol, which does not need any participation of mobile nodes. PMIPv6 does not support the multicast well and most of the current research concentrates on the mobile multicast receiver. However, the mobile multicast sender is also very important and challenging, which has not been addressed well. Therefore, in this paper we propose two efficient PMIPv6 based mobile multicast sender support schemes which are PMIP bidirectional tunneling (PMIP-BT) and PMIP direct routing (PMIP-DR). In the PMIP-BT, the multicast traffic can be delivered through the PMIPv6 bidirectional tunnel, while, in the PMIP-DR, the multicast data can be transmitted via an optimized direct multicast routing. Both of them can support the multicast sender mobility transparently enabled in the PMIPv6 networks. We evaluate the performance of the proposed schemes by theoretical analysis, and the numerical results show that the proposed schemes have a better performance in terms of the signaling cost than the current schemes. Meanwhile, the proposed schemes are also implemented on the test bed, and the experimental results not only verify the validity and feasibility of our proposed schemes, but also conclude the different scenarios to which they are applicable.