Multicast in 3G networks:: employment of existing IP multicast protocols in UMTS

In this article we discuss the use of commonly deployed IP multicast protocols in UMTS networks. We analyze three possible UMTS multicast architectures, all employing standard IP multicast protocols. We study the architectures' ability to handle: group management, data-security, authentication and authorization of multicast source/receivers, multicast session identification, terminal mobility and collection of billing data. For one of the architectures we quantify the performance of the design for two multimedia service examples.