Adaptive Multicast Membership Management for Mobile Multicast Receivers

The fast development and deployment of the Internet and mobile communication has boosted personal computing and communication. The ever-increasing number of personal devices accessing the Internet demands IP mobility support ubiquitously. However, the current TCP/IP protocol suite is not able to fully support IP mobility, especially when real-time applications are concerned. This paper discusses the IP mobility support in general and IP multicast receiver mobility support in particular. The current Internet is capable of providing basic mobility support for IP multicast when mobile hosts act as IP multicast receivers. However, the worst case handover latency introduced by IP layer handover is usually unacceptable to the real-time applications running in the mobile receivers. In order to overcome this, we propose a Mobility Support Agent (MSA) architecture and a set of protocols to help achieve seamless IP multicast mobility. Our testbed runs IGMPv2 and PIM-SM. Measurements have shown that by using the MSA architecture, the handover latency introduced by the current multicast membership management protocols and multicast routing protocols is nearly negligible.

Mobile multicast has two points of view. One is focused on the mobile receiver and the other is focused on the mobile source. Mobile multicast also has two approaches. When a mobile source wants to send multicast traffic, it uses either a designated router in the foreign network or its home agent (HA). These are called remote approach and bi-directional tunneling approach respectively. When a mobile receiver wants to subscribe multicast traffic, it uses either remote-subscription approach or bi-directional tunneling approach also. In the meantime, there needs to be a group key management scheme to treat multicast traffic safe. It is important that group key update occurs to preserve the join/leave secrecy when group membership changed. It is also important that maintaining scalability to manage highly dynamic membership. When a mobile sender or receiver changes its attachment point, a group key update occurs extremely many times in traditional group key management schemes with remote approach. Thus, to solve this problem, we propose new group key management scheme in this paper. The proposed scheme prevents the group key update during channel migration. Hence, it can help reducing overhead which is caused by group key update, providing salability and maintaining the join/leave secrecy.

Several multicast protocols for mobile ad hoc networks have been proposed, which build multicast trees by using location information that is available from the Global Positioning System (GPS) or localization algorithms and use geographic forwarding to forward packets down the multicast trees. These stateless multicast protocols carry encoded membership, location, and tree information in each packet and are more efficient and robust than stateful protocols (for example, ADMR and ODMRP), as they avoid the difficulty of maintaining distributed state in the presence of frequent topology changes. However, current stateless multicast protocols are not scalable to large groups because of the per-packet encoding overhead, and the centralized group membership and location management. In this paper I propose a novel Robust and Scalable Geographic Multicast Protocol (RSGM). Several virtual architectures are used in the protocol without need of maintaining state information for more robust and scalable membership management and packet forwarding in the presence of high network dynamics due to unstable wireless channels and node movements. Specifically, scalable and efficient group membership management is performed through a virtual-zone-based structure, and the location service for group members is integrated with the membership management. Both the control messages and data packets are forwarded along efficient tree-like paths, but there is no need to explicitly create and actively maintain a tree structure. The stateless virtual-tree-based structures significantly reduce the tree management overhead, support more efficient transmissions, and make the transmissions much more robust to dynamics. Geographic forwarding is used to achieve further scalability and robustness. To avoid periodic flooding of the source information throughout the network, an efficient source tracking mechanism is designed to focus on minimizing join latency, repair latency, and control overhead. I have design a routing protocol based on these principles and demonstrate its effectiveness through simulations.

Mobility support in IP networks requires servers to forward packets to mobile hosts and to maintain information pertaining to a mobile host's location in the network. In the mobile Internet Protocol (mobile-IP), location and packet forwarding functions are provided by servers referred to as home agents. These home agents may become the bottleneck when there are a large number of mobile hosts in the network. In this paper, we consider the design and analysis of a replicated server architecture in which multiple home agents are used to provide mobility support. In order to minimize the delay across the home agents, one of the key aspects is the design of load balancing schemes in which a home agent may transfer the control of a mobile host to another home agent in the same network. The methods for triggering the transfer and the policy for selecting the next home agent define various load balancing schemes which have different performance characteristics. In this paper, we design a protocol that forms the building block for implementing such load balancing schemes, and we then study the performance characteristics of random, round-robin, and join the shortest queue (JSQ) selection policies, and timer-, counter- and threshold-based transfer policies.

Mobile IP was developed to enable computers to maintain Internet connectivity while moving from one Internet attachment point to another. Apparent inefficiencies of the basic Mobile IP (MIP) are triangle routing and home agent overloading. A technique to prevent the triangle routing problem of MIP is proposed. An encapsulation technique is modified to give a better delay performance for MIP. Instead of encapsulation at the home agent, the encapsulation is done at one level up in a hierarchical network. This reduces the delay of travelling the same link twice. The processing delay is also reduced, as the processing is not centralised at the home agent. Simulation of the original and proposed MIPs is carried out using NS-2 simulator on the Linux platform. The performance graphs show the improvement of the proposed MIP over the original MIP.

This paper proposes a new technique for Mobile IP (MIP) registration by WLAN host (WH) through GPRS network. The home agent (HA) of WH resides in external IP network. The gateway GPRS support node (GGSN) provides foreign agent (FA) functionality for WH in GPRS. After successful attach with GPRS network, WH needs two mandatory passes for MIP registration with HA. First it establishes PDP (packet data protocol) context in GPRS network and then it sends MIP registration request (MRR) to FA at GGSN. This causes a large delay for handoff from WLAN to GPRS. We propose a one-pass technique of MIP registration through GPRS network to reduce the handoff delay. We transport MIP-registration request of WH in the information field of activate-PDP-context request message to GGSN. Thus MIP registration message reaches GGSN before completion of PDP context establishment. This technique reduces the control signaling for handoff from WLAN to GPRS. We observed from simulated results that proposed one-pass technique reduces handoff delay by 18% compared to handoff delay in two-pass method.

The Mobile IP standard for mobility management on the Internet enables transparent communication between mobile hosts (MHs) and their correspondent hosts (CHs). However, it suffers from triangular routing and prolonged handoff latency problems. Solutions such as route optimization and micro-mobility protocols either solve these problems partially or require costly modifications to the CHs. In this paper, we propose to use temporary home agent (TA) to address both problems without requiring any special support on CHs. TA exploits the locality of user movement observed in recent studies for PCS and wireless data networks. It does so by dynamically selecting a Mobile IP home agent based on the location of the user. The TA allocates a temporary home address, THAddr to the MH, which the MH may use as its source address. The underlying objective is to shorten the distance between a MH and its home agent, which is a critical factor in reducing handoff latency and improving routing efficiency. Our scheme is shown to outperform Mobile IP and is comparable to route optimization (RO) through both quantitative analysis and ns simulations. While our approach focus on improving the performance for sessions that are initiated by the MH, methods for optimizing traffic handling for sessions initiated by CHs are discussed.

The growing popularity of IEEE 802.11 has made wireless LAN a potential candidate technology for providing high speed wireless access services. Also, by supporting Mobile IP, wireless LAN can meet demands for expanded wireless access coverage while maintaining continuous connectivity from one wireless LAN to another. In the Mobile IP procedure, mobile node movement can be detected from advertisements of foreign agents that differ from the previously received advertisement and the new care-of address is registered with the home agent. However, user packets are not forwarded to the new foreign agent until registration is completed and this interruption may degrade the quality of service especially in real-time applications such as audio and video or may lower the TCP throughput due to retransmission timeout. To tackle these issues, we propose a new low latency handoff method, where access points used in a wireless LAN environment and a dedicated MAC bridge are jointly used to alleviate packet loss without altering the Mobile IP specifications. In this paper, we present the design architecture of the proposed method and evaluate its performance in an actual network environment to verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Paging Mobile Internet Protocol can reduce signaling cost and power consumption in Mobile Internet Protocol (Mobile IP) significantly by utilizing the idle state of the Mobile Node. Paging Mobile IP, however, still use the same registration method as Mobile IP. Registration takes long delay if Mobile Node roams far way from its Home Agent. Therefore, Paging Mobile IP still has poor performance in terms of handoff latency and number of lost packets. In this research, we propose to combine Paging Mobile IP with regional registration and multicasting to improve its performance. Gateway Foreign Agent is introduced in the visited domain to handle regional registration and paging process. We apply multicasting to send packets from Gateway Foreign Agent to Mobile Node so that the Mobile Node can receive packets as soon as it moves to new cell. Two methods are proposed. The first method uses Network Layer information for movement detection and construction of multicast group while the second method utilizes Link Layer information for the same purposes. We simulate our proposed methods by using Borland Delphi 7 and compare their performance to Mobile IP, Paging Mobile IP, Paging Mobile IP Post Registration, and Paging Mobile IP Regional Registration in terms of handoff latency, number of lost packets, signaling cost, and data hop. Simulation results in all scenarios show that our proposed methods perform much better than original Paging Mobile IP Protocol. Proposed Method 1 has the best performance in terms of handoff latency and number of lost packets among all protocols that use Network Layer information for movement detection. Furthermore, Proposed Method 2 also performs better than Paging Mobile IP Post Registration in most scenarios.

This paper describes the design and implementation of a highly configurable and robust Mobile IP framework that employs active networking principles. Through the provision of open programmable interfaces and execution environment, new mobile services or application-specific customized services can be rapidly developed and deployed within the Mobile IP networking environment. ANTS [11] is being employed as the baseline active network execution environment for the implementation of our programmable Mobile IP framework. In particular, we have extended ANTS considerably to export mobile IP native interfaces to support mobile specific functionalities. The design of our active Mobile IP framework is currently implemented over the Linux operating system. The programmable framework is applied to the Mobile IP agent nodes namely, the mobile node, foreign agent, home agent and correspondent node. To demonstrate the ease of designing and deploying new mobile services, this paper describes the setup of an experiment to implement an active route optimization service.

Mobile IP presents an efficient solution to the wide-area host mobility problem in the Internet. Nevertheless, its home registration process introduces an overhead in the local-area mobility case. A mobile host is required to register with its possibly distant home agent, whenever it changes its point of attachment to the network. Foreign agent hierarchies have been introduced to perform regional mobile IP registration to minimize the home registration signaling overhead. We propose a novel configurable architecture to organize cooperating foreign agent hierarchies in the foreign domain. An attempt is made not to change the mobile host home registered care-of address as long as it is within the foreign domain. In such a manner, home registration signaling overhead is minimized, and the home agent is isolated from any local-area movement by the mobile host.

Mobile wireless devices have intermittent connectivity, sometimes intentional. This is a problem for conventional Mobile IP, beyond its well-known routing inefficiencies and deployment issues. DHARMA selects a location-optimized instance from a distributed set of home agents to minimize routing overheads; set management and optimization are done using the PlanetLab overlay network. DHARMA's session support overcomes both transitions between home agent instances and intermittent connectivity. Cross-layer information sharing between the session layer and the overlay network are used to exploit multiple wireless links when available. The DHARMA prototype supports intermittently connected legacy TCP applications in a variety of scenarios and is largely portable across host operating systems. Experiments with DHARMA deployed on more than 200 PlanetLab nodes demonstrate routing performance consistently better than that for best-case Mobile IP.

A secure and efficient mobile IP (MIP) registration protocol using certificateless signature scheme is proposed. The protocol minimises the registration time through minimal usage of an efficient certificateless signature scheme between a foreign agent (FA) and a home agent (HA). Protocol parameters can be kept resynchronised by reusing the initial values in the MIP registration in case the synchronisation between a mobile node (MN) and HA is lost. User anonymity is achieved via a temporary identity transmitted by a mobile user, instead of its true identity. Additional replay protection from the FA is included in the registration messages to prevent a possible replay attack. Numerical results and performance analyses demonstrate that the proposed protocol outperforms the existing ones in terms of the registration time, registration signalling traffic and computational load on an MN while providing improved security. For example, the proposed protocol reduces the registration time up to ∼83% compared with the protocol from Yang.

This paper explores the issues of mobile multicast scheme using Mobile-IPv6, and addresses the case when a mobile host is a source as well as a recipient of a given multicast operation. A new multicast routing protocol, called MSMA(MLD-based mobile multicast for handling Source Mobility in All-IP networks), with the MLD(Multicast Listener Discovery) and MDA(Multicast Delivery Agent) functionality to mobile hosts in Mobile-IPv6 based All-IP networks is proposed. The proposed MLD-based multicasting protocol asks its HA(Home Agent) to stop forwarding multicast for group using tunneling. Thus, the proposed protocol satisfies the maximum tolerable transfer delay and mitigates the forwarding task of HA.

Problem statement: Mobile Internet Protocol (MIP) is the forms of the backbone for next generation wireless internet technology to provide uninterrupted network service while a node on the move. The original MIP use Home Agent to forward the traffic. Thus, it does not have problem with simultaneous mobility, i.e., the special case when both end nodes are mobile and move at about the same time. However, MIPv6 uses location binding updates which sent directly to a correspondent node to complete its registration. Thus, MIPv6 is vulnerable to the simultaneous mobility problem which leads to the interruption of communication and cause messages lost, especially protocol messages. Approach: This article analyzed the simultaneous and successive fast mobility problems and handover latency. Then propose a mechanism by adopting technique to the mobile node’s Home Agent. Results: We simulated the proposed scheme using ns-2 and we present and analyze the performance testing for the proposed scheme by comparing it with the conventional MIPv6. Conclusion: Simulation results showed this scheme can effectively resolve simultaneous and successive mobility problems and reduce the handover latency which is affected by long registration time.