Fast Handover Mechanism for Seamless Multicasting Services in Mobile IPv6 Wireless Networks

This paper proposes a fast handover mechanism to provide a seamless multicast service for Mobile IPv6 hosts. With the proposed Fast handover based on a Mobile IP-Multi casting (FMIP-M) protocol, the selection of a new multicast service method, service preparation, and initialization procedures are all performed during the fast handover period, thereby enabling a reliable and efficient multicast service. When mobile hosts move to other networks, they can encounter data loss, out-of-synch problems for multicast data, and multicast service exchange latency. Therefore, the proposed FMIP-M allows the new access router to select a suitable multicast service method according to the multicast service-related network conditions and supports a reliable multicast transmission by compensating for data losses from the previous access router. An analysis is conducted of the overheads associated with a fast multicast handover, including the signaling cost and multicast packet-forwarding cost, where the costs are formulated based on timing diagrams, and compared with a fast handover using Mobile IPv6. The performance analysis and numerical results confirm that the proposed FMIP-M provides a fast multicast handover and reliable service with a relatively small signaling cost and packet-delivery cost.