An Agent-based Approach for Multicast Applications in Mobile Wireless Networks

In this paper we propose a mobility support for multicast systems in a radio environment. This mobility support permits to a multicast mobile host (MMH) to maintain the connection to a multicast group, when it is moving from a network to another, with low connection loss occurrence or group joint delay. With this aim, an agent-based architecture has been designed and implemented. The mobility support acts in a transparent way, without any changes in MMH software, in network protocols and in multicast system applications. This architecture makes predictions about MMH movement and performs a reservation of resource in advance, by means of a re-creation in advance of the multicast tree. The effectiveness of our proposal has been tested with simulation test fields.