Anycast Group Algorithms for Mobile Multicast Communications

Multicast has been an efficient service for applications such as video conferencing, resources discover and service location, etc. Although multicasting is well developed for static hosts, it is hard to harness in the wireless environment where resources are limited such as bandwidth and power of mobile units. This paper presents a novel and efficient multicast algorithm that aims at reducing delay and communication cost for the registration between mobile nodes and mobility agents and solicitation for foreign agent services based on Mobile IP. The protocol applies anycast group technology to support multicast transmissions for both mobile nodes and home/foreign agents. Mobile hosts use anycast tunneling to connect to an nearest available home/foreign agents where an agent is able to anycast route the multicast messages to a multicast router for efficient multicasting of messages. The performance analysis and experiments demonstrated that our algorithm can enhance the performance over existing remote subscription and bidirectional tunneling approaches regardless of the locations of mobile nodes.