A Framework to Support Fast Inter-Domain Mobility in All-IP Networks

Abstract

Development of wireless networks is towards all-IP architecture. One of the main challenges here is the development of suitable mobility solutions. Mobile IP (MIP) presents the standard protocol used to support mobility in IP networks. However, MIP is inadequate for real-time applications. Therefore, micro mobility management is introduced to process the mobility locally inside a certain domain. However, the movement between different domains is processed using MIP. Mobile IP fast authentication protocol (MIFA) is proposed to avoid the problems of MIP and to match the requirements of real-time applications. Our analysis has shown that MIFA outperforms MIP with respect to the handoff latency and the number of dropped packets. Thus, it is useful to integrate MIFA with other micro mobility protocols to support fast inter-domain mobility. In this paper we propose a framework to support mobility in all-IP networks. This framework uses hierarchical MIP (HMIP) to support intra-domain mobility and MIFA to support inter-domain mobility. We have simulated this framework using ns-2. Our results show that our proposal achieves fast and smooth handover between the domains. Inter-domain mobility is accelerated to be approximately same as intradomain mobility. Additionally, our proposal is more efficient when the MN is far a way