A new SSM approach for mobile environments

Authors

Abstract

In the last few years, multicast communication has deserved an increasing attention by the scientific and the enterprise communities. Multicast technology offers bandwidth optimization and reduces the time required for forwarding data to multiple destinations. For these reasons, and also due to the growing number of multipoint applications, Internet Service Providers are interested in solutions for multicast support.
Each day, new communication models with multi-access capabilities are being proposed. However, simulation systems and tools are not accompanying this increase in number and variety, and the ones that exist are extremely limited in terms of multicast support.
This paper starts by presenting a new module for the study of multicast environments using the Network Simulator 2, developed at the Laboratory of Communications and Telematics of the University of Coimbra, for Source Specific Multicast support. Subsequently, it proposes a new multicast approach that adapts the Source Specific Multicast protocol to mobile environments. This proposal was evaluated using the presented NS-2 module. The results showed that the proposed approach leads to significant improvement when compared to the standard SSM approach.