Performance evaluation of multicast transmissions with mobile sources

AbsfracfThe recent and increasing popularity of wireless transmission systems has initiated a strong interest in resesrch on mobile IP communications. While most of this interest is focused on unicast communications, there has recently been an growing focus to suppori multicast communications with mobile sources and, in particular, Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) sources. To address this issue, the Mobile IPv6 specifications currently being developed by the IETF briefly introduce one possible solution known as bi-directional tunneling. In parallel, a set of mechanisms called MSSMSv6 which supports an optimized multicast routing has also been proposed. However to date, there has been no attempt to evaluate the performance of these proposals. This paper therefore aims to compare the efficiency of the IETF solution with the MSSMSv6 scheme in the particular case of Source-Specific Multicast (SSM) mobile sources. A large set of simulations has been produced to evaluate and compare the performance of these two proposals. It clearly shows that the IETF solution introduces sub-optimal routing, in contrast to the MSSMSv6 proposal which builds dynamic shortest-path multicast trees that follow the position of the mobile sources.