RAMS: A Protocol Extension to PMIPv6 for Improving Handover Performance of Multicast Traffic

IP multicast allows the efficient support of group communication services. The increase in the use of multicast has also triggered the need for supporting IP multicast in mobile environments. It is necessary to consider current unicast mobility management solutions in IP-based networks to smoothly extend multicast services to mobile users. Proxy Mobile IPv6 is a network-based mobility management solution, where the functionality to support the terminal movement resides in the network. Recently, a base solution has been adopted for supporting multicast in PMIPv6. Nevertheless, this solution has not special features to optimize performance during handovers and this can cause disruptions in the reception of multicast traffic by the mobile terminals. This paper proposes and evaluates RAMS, an extension to the PMIPv6 protocol for accelerating the multicast service delivery to mobile terminals after handovers. We explore the performance gain obtained by RAMS, compared against the base solution, using two different radio access network scenarios: 3GPP UTRAN and LTE.