Improving Multicast Stability in Mobile Multicast Scheme Using Motion Prediction

Stability is an important issue in multicast, especially in mobile environment where joining and leaving behaviors occur much more frequently. In this paper, we propose a scheme to improve the multicast stability by the use of motion prediction. The mobile node (MN) predicts the staying time before entering the new network, if the time is long enough, it will ask the new network to join the multicast tree as usual. Otherwise, the new network should create a tunnel to the multicast agent of MN to receive multicast packets. Considering that networks usually have different power range, the staying time is not predicted directly, and the Average Staying Time is used instead. The prediction algorithm is effective but practical which requires little calculation time and memory size. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can improve the stability of multicast tree remarkably while bring much smaller cost.