System and method for efficient use of radio resources in multicast services in mobile wireless communications systems

摘要

Approaches for resource efficient multicast communications in mobile satellite systems are provided. A wireless gateway is configured to encapsulate multicast signaling messages received from participating remote terminals. The encapsulation is compatible with the core network of the system, whereby the signaling is passed through the core network undetected. The signaling is received by a multicast gateway, and provides necessary IP and port addressing information for the multicast gateway to encapsulate the multicast session data in a manner compatible with the core network. Upon receiving multicast session data from a multicast server, the multicast gateway replicates and encapsulates each data packet with IP and port addressing for each participating remote terminal, which is also passed through the core network undetected. The wireless gateway receives the replicated data packets, and based on the encapsulation information, transmits each data packet via a broadcast transmission to each cell wherein participating terminals are located.

主权项

1. A method comprising:
receiving, by a wireless gateway of a communications network, a message packet from a host terminal, wherein the message packet is destined for a multicast control node of the communications network, and the message packet includes a multicast session identifier that identifies a multicast session being joined by the host terminal; encapsulating the message packet as a transport layer unicast tunnel packet, including at least one source identifier of the host terminal and at least one destination identifier of the multicast control node; and transmitting the transport layer unicast tunnel packet to the multicast control node, wherein the transport layer unicast tunnel packet is configured to direct the multicast control node to bind to a multicast distribution tree associated with the multicast session.