Seamless Mobility of Senders Transmitting Multi-user Sessions over Heterogeneous Networks

The development of wireless technologies together with the increasing portability of telecommunication devices lead to the necessity to develop communication systems capable of supporting a seamless mobility experience to end-users. Moreover, the arising of multi-user real-time services has emphasized the importance of the multicast communication to deliver content to multiple simultaneous receivers. The simultaneous increase in the production and distribution of multimedia content by both mobile service providers and consumers requires an efficient solution for the mobility management of multicast sources. This way, mobility management of multicast senders is a challenging and unsolved task for the successful development of next generation user-centric mobile networks, where the nomadic user is not only a consumer but also a provider of multimedia content. A proposal to constraint losses during the handover of multicast senders, and consequently, to avoid the service degradation perceived by receivers is presented in this paper. Simulation results confirm the ability of the proposed mechanism to reduce or completely avoid packet losses, increasing the perceived quality of the received sessions.