Investigation of home routers with connectivity issues, and proposal for improving interconnectivity

There are many standards for interconnectivity technology in home networks, and many of them use multicast communications. In these standards, the method to implement IGMP, a protocol for group management of multicast in IPv4, is outside the scope for the standard. Therefore, the operation of IGMP at each terminal may be different depending on the interpretation by the developer of the standard for IGMP. Some home routers do not implement IGMP according to any standard, so depending on the combination of the terminal and home router, interconnection using multicast communication may not be possible in some cases. In this paper, we investigate implementations of IGMP in home routers that prevent interconnectivity of home network technologies. In addition, we clarify the issue and propose a method to improve interconnectivity through a terminal side implementation against the home router issue. Furthermore, evaluation and consideration of the proposed method are described.