Approach to support IP multicasting in networks with mobile hosts

It is an efficient way for a mobile host to obtain multicast service via a local multicast router on the visited network. However, there is a possibility for a temporary disruption of multicast service due to the join latency and other issues in handoff procedure. This paper proposes a scheme to solve such a problem. A smooth handoff mechanism is introduced to avoid unnecessary data loss. Besides, any mobility agent capable of multicast can be appointed to provide service to mobile hosts, which makes it possible to deploy the protocol widely. Discrete-event simulations were conducted to survey the performance of the proposed scheme. The simulation results show that the scheme has better performance than the compared approaches.