Supporting Multicast in CDMA Cellular Systems

Abstract

This paper studies the issue of multicast support in CDMA cellular systems. The IETF Mobile IP has suggested two solutions for mobile multicast: remote subscription (MIP-RS) and bi-directional tunneling (MIP-BT). In this paper, we propose a new mobile multicast approach for CDMA cellular systems, which is based on MIP-RS. However, it is known that MIP-RS based approaches suffer from two important problems due to a handoff: multicast delivery disruption and packet losses. For the multicast delivery disruption, the proposed approach predefines all possible multicast paths. When a handoff occurs, the new multicast tree can be quickly reconstructed. For the packet losses, the proposed approach utilizes an intrinsic function of a CDMA cellular system: soft handoff, to reduce the recovery overhead of lost packets. Simulation experiments are performed to compare the proposed approach with previous approaches.