A new locality-based IP multicasting scheme for mobile hosts

Internet protocol multicasting is a mechanism widely used in the Internet t o disseminate information. Multicast delivery paths may need to be frequent ly restructured along with host migrations, at the expense of nontrivial ov erhead or multicast latency. This paper presents a scheme with short multic ast latency, while retaining acceptable overhead in adapting the delivery p aths to mobile host locations. We exploit the locality in host movements an d keep active the networks that mobile hosts have most recently visited. As long as hosts migrate within these active networks, multicast delivery pat hs can remain unchanged upon host movements. Performance results show that, compared with the best known proposal, our scheme is promising. (C) 2001 E lsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.