As the number of users of mobile communication and the Internet increases, mobile multicasting is an emerging technique towards the free mobile communication with plentiful bandwidths. This thesis proposes a new mobile multicast protocol. The proposed protocol facilitates a mobility-adaptive approach and active loss recovery, and it is implemented in an active network. The protocol achieves some performance improvement in a mobile multicast environment and shows how to develop a new protocol or service in an active network.
The protocol has two characteristics: mobility-adaptive routing and active loss recovery. For mobility-adaptive routing, the protocol selects a routing scheme adaptive to the host mobility. There are two different routing schemes in mobile multicast: foreign agent routing scheme (referred to as remote subscription), and home agent routing scheme (referred to as bi-directional tunneling). According to the mobility of a mobile host, one routing scheme is superior to the other. From the discussion, the mobility-adaptive routing scheme is developed. For active loss recovery, the protocol facilitates caching data packets that would be lost during handoffs in the network. After the handoff, the network could recover the loss as soon as the mobile host registers itself to the network again. After all, the proposed mobile multicast protocol would present the better performance, i.e., transmission delay in the experimentation of the thesis.
Also, this thesis presents how rapidly and easily one can develop a new service in an active network. An active network is a wholly new networking paradigm, where data packets traversing in the network or switches handling packets can have some intelligence by evaluating program codes given by users. This simple change makes the active network greatly different from the present ‘passive’ Internet. The active network provides more flexibility for service developers, which enables that they can deploy new services into the network rapidly and easily. From the discussion, the mobility-adaptive mobile multicast protocol proposed in this thesis is implemented in an active network, which is implemented virtually. The virtual active network whose active router is composed of an ATM switch and an active server facilitates the virtual networking of the ANTS (Active Node Transport System) toolkit.
In this thesis, the experimentation for performance evaluation of the proposed protocol is performed in the virtual active network. The performance improvement of the proposed mobility-adaptive mobile multicast protocol is approved by the result of the experiments.
