A new locality-based IP multicasting scheme for mobile hosts

Abstract

Internet protocol multicasting is a mechanism widely used in the Internet to disseminate information. Multicast delivery paths may need to be frequently restructured along with host migrations, at the expense of nontrivial overhead or multicast latency. This paper presents a scheme with short multicast latency, while retaining acceptable overhead in adapting the delivery paths to mobile host locations. We exploit the locality in host movements and keep active the networks that mobile hosts have most recently visited. As long as hosts migrate within these active networks, multicast delivery paths can remain unchanged upon host movements. Performance results show that, compared with the best known proposal, our scheme is promising. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.