A Novel Location Management Scheme and Routing Protocol for Group Communications in Cellular IP Networks

In this paper, a novel location management scheme called Distributed Group Tracking (DGT) for group communications in Cellular IP networks is proposed. In DGT, Base stations track each member of a group and build a share multicast routing tree called DGT-Tree for the group in a distributed manner. Transmission of multicast packets among group members is along the group’s DGT-Tree. Simulation study has demonstrated that a better performance can be achieved by DGT over the gateway-based counterpart in terms of transmission cost as well as link load balance. Moreover, the average number of DGT operations decreases as the group size increases, showing the good scalability of the DGT scheme, and the average number of control packets as well as the cache requirement for performing DGT operations demonstrate the moderate overhead introduced by DGT. key words: cellular IP, mobility management, multicast, group communications