Novel branching-router-based multicast routing protocol with mobility support

To cope with challenging problems faced by traditional multicast routing protocols, many branching-router (BR)-based multicast routing schemes with desirable features have been proposed. However, the current BR-based methods still lack efficient multicast management and suffer from a long join latency, leading to a disappointing mobility performance. In this paper, we propose a novel BR-based multicast architecture with a corresponding multicast routing protocol supporting multicast receiver mobility. In the proposed multicast architecture, a new management entity called multicast controller (MC) is used to handle most of the multicast management-related tasks, while other routers in the network construct a multicast tree according to the proposed Branching-Router-based Multicast routing protocol with Mobility support (BRMM). Besides, the fast handover of multicast service can be supported by BRMM through the pre-establishment of temporary multicast paths. Through extensive simulation and analysis, we show that BRMM outperforms existing protocols and has many other attractive features.