A mobile accessible closed multi-part group communication scheme in IPv6 network

Abstract

To solve the problems of current IP multicast which includes poor inter-domain many-to-many group support, security vulnerabilities and dependency to specific multicast infrastructure, a mobile accessible closed multi-part group (MACMPG) communication protocol in IPv6 network is proposed. By extending the single source multicast protocol, the communication channel for multi-part group communication across domains is established. Based on IPv6 CGA, the secure closed group communication scheme is designed. The access to the multicast traffic only confined to the authorized senders and receivers and only trusted routers are allowed to be the branch points of MACMPG tree. By tunneling mechanism, the MACMPG traffic can be transmitted across non-MACMPG routing area, and the mobile nodes can join the group remotely and roam freely between domains, which eliminates the dependency on specific IP multicast routing.New applications in the Internet have increasing demand for multi-part group communication. However, the current IP multicast models have poor support for inter-domain many-to-many group communication, and they are vulnerable to various attacks and dependent to specific multicast routing [1,2] . Currently there is no feasible and widely deployed scheme for accorss-domain multi-source multicast. Recent years, the researchers have attempted to support multi-source applications using SSM (source specfic multicast). But they have some flaws in one way or another. The multi-channel SSM [3] has poor scalability; the relay-based SSM [4] has the single-pointof-failure problem, or it can form traffic aggregation at the relay node and the links around it and then cause high packet loss ratio; SSM-Extension [5] is complex and unscalable, and it consumes lots of time when forming the bi-directional tree.A self-configuring lightweight internet multicast (SLIM) protocol is proposed in Ref. [6]. Its main idea is the nodes and routing areas that do not support multicast can be bypassed by tunnelling mechanism. It is scalable and easy to be employed. But SLIM is only suitable for one-to-many group communication applications. In addition, a concrete solution to tackle the security problem was not proposed.In this paper, a mobile accessible closed multi-part group (MACMPG) communication scheme in IPv6 network is proposed. By extending SLIM's control message, a hybrid multi-source-multi-receiver multicast tree