Wide-Area Traffic: IP Multicast Receiver Handover for Mobile IP Networks

Network arrivals are often modeled as Poisson processes for analytic simplicity, even though a number of traffic studies have shown that packet interarrivals are not exponentially distributed. We evaluate 24 wide-area traces, investigating a number of wide-area TCP arrival processes (session and connection arrivals, FTP data connection arrivals within FTP sessions, and TELNET packet arrivals) to determine the error introduced by modeling those using Poisson processes. The ever-increasing number of personal devices accessing the Internet demands IP mobility support ubiquitously. However, the current TCP/IP protocol suite is not able to fully support IP mobility, especially when real-time applications are concerned. This paper discusses the IP mobility support in general and IP multicast receiver mobility support in particular. The current Internet is capable of providing basic mobility support for IP multicast when mobile hosts act as IP multicast receivers. However, the worst case handover latency introduced by IP layer handover is usually unacceptable to the real-time applications running in the mobile receivers. In order to overcome this, we propose a Mobility Support Agent (MSA) architecture and a set of protocols to help achieve seamless IP multicast mobility.