Satellite mobile multicast for aeronautical communication

Abstract

Satellite communication with its world-wide coverage has now become an indispensable part of the Aeronautical communication. Support for high-speed Internet access by the new generation satellite systems has made the provision of IP-based multimedia applications on-board the aircraft possible at all times. Considering the expensive nature of satellite resources, IP multicast can provide a cost-effective and bandwidth saving means of delivering real-time group communication and streaming media to air passengers and crew during a flight. In IP multicast communication, traffic from the source travels along the established multicast tree to reach all group members. For mobile receivers like the aircraft which may move from one satellite beam to another, then special techniques are required to ensure that a branch of the multicast tree follows the mobile receiver into the target beam. This paper proposes a novel technique based on the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) protocol to support IP multicast receiver mobility over satellite networks for an aircraft as it moves and changes its point of attachment from one satellite gateway (GW) to another. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is better than the Mobile IPv6-based approach in terms of GW handover (GWH) latency and number of packets lost during GWH.