DMMS: A flexible architecture for multicast listener support in a distributed mobility management environment

The mobile network operators are being challenged by the explosion of mobile data traffic in terms of network performance and generated revenue. On one hand, efficient mobility management plays a crucial role to support mobile users, however, the current mobility protocols have several major limitations from their centralized and hierarchical nature (e.g., sub-optimal routing, scalability and reliability issues). Distributed mobility management (DMM) is a new, very promising trend to overcome these limitations by flattening the network architecture and dynamically providing the mobility support. Based on the fact that the mobile Internet traffic will be dominated by the mobile video, the scalability and bandwidth efficiency from multicast routing makes the IP multicast play a crucial role. However, one of the main challenges for multicast support is the mobility of a multicast node, leading to several issues for both multicast service and network operator such as long service disruption, high end-to-end delay, non-optimal routing and traffic replication. Driven from the fact that different multicast flows have very different characteristics and each network operator has different policies for multicast support, we propose a dynamic multicast support scheme (DMMS), taking into account both the user and network operator point of view. DMMS allows to dynamically provide the appropriate multicast support mode based on a set of contexts such as the service’s characteristics, mobility of the node and network context to adapt to the service’s requirements as well as operator’s policies.