The increasing penetration of the mobile devices is generating a huge number of data traffic over mobile networks. The mobile data traffic is expected to grow to 15.9 exabytes per month by 2018, a 11-fold increase over 2013. Facing this challenge, from the mobile network operator point of view, IP multicast is expected to be a cost-effective solution to deal with a huge number of traffic demands (especially video traffic). As a part of an all-IP system, multicast should be considered with the IP mobility protocol, which plays the crucial role in the future networks. However, the interaction of IP multicast and IP mobility protocol raises some issues such as service interruption, packet loss, leave latency, non-optimal routing, and packet duplication. These issues may become the main obstacle for the deployment of the multicast service in the real world.
In this thesis, our main objective is to deal with the multicast mobility-related issues. The solutions are proposed in the context of the evolution of the current IP mobility management: from the host-based to the network-based, and also from the centralized to the distributed mobility management. In more details, for a single PMIPv6 domain, we introduce a method to reduce the service disruption and leave latency. We then present a solution from the load balancing point of view to address the service disruption and packet duplication issues. As DMM has not been standardized, we propose an inter-domain mobility solution, which can be considered as a step in the evolution from PMIP towards DMM. Finally, we converge to a final architecture in a DMM environment that can offer various benefits and address most of the multicast listener mobility-related issues. Throughout this thesis, a near-to-real testbed is used to achieve the realistic results.
