With the rapid progress of multicast applications and more users participating in it, IP multicast has been an important subject in both research and development. In the meantime, due to the rapid promulgation of mobile devices and progress in wireless technology these years, it is imperative to determine the best way to provide services to mobile equipment. Because IP multicast naturally has the merit of high scalability and efficiency, which is more significant for mobile environment whose resource is much limited, more and more people pay attention to these two techniques, and many efforts are being made to bring them together. In this paper, a comprehensive survey on mobile multicast arithmetics and schemes is given, the advantages and application range of these arithmetics or schemes are discussed respectively, also the shortcomings and problems existed are anatomized in depth, and then a comprehensive comparison is given. In view of poor reliability in mobile environment, a detailed investigation of new problems when implementing reliable multicast to mobile hosts is given, and some related works are introduced. It was hoped that the illustration and discussion presented here would be helpful for developers in selecting an appropriate mobile multicast arithmetic or protocol for their specific needs. In the end, the future trend of combining multicast and mobile is discussed.