End-To-End Mobility for the Internet Using ILNP

Ditchaphong Phoomikiattisak,Saleem N Bhatti

doi:10.1155/2019/7464179

Abstract

As the use of mobile devices and methods of wireless connectivity continue to increase, seamless mobility becomes more desirable and important. The current IETF Mobile IP standard relies on additional network entities for mobility management, can have poor performance, and has seen little deployment in real networks. We present a host-based mobility solution with a true end-to-end architecture using the Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP). We show how the TCP code in the Linux kernel can be extended allowing legacy TCP applications that use the standard C sockets API to operate over ILNP without requiring changes or recompilation. Our direct testbed performance comparison shows that ILNP provides better host mobility support than Mobile IPv6 in terms of session continuity, packet loss, and handoff delay for TCP.

Highlights

Mobility is an increasingly important aspect of communication for the Internet
We present here a selection of proposed solutions for host mobility support, focusing on those that have been reviewed by the IETF or the Internet Research Task Force (IRTF), i.e., those that are considered to be deployable at scale
In our experiments with ILNPv6, TCP handoff still performed better than with Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6): (i) with ILNPv6 soft-handoff, there was no interruption of the flows for any scenario (Section 6.1); (ii) more data was transferred in the same timeframe, in most cases (Section 6.1.1); (iii) ILNPv6 soft-handoff had the lowest number of retransmission attempts (Section 6.1.2) with almost zero packet loss (Section 6.1.3); and (iv) handoff delay was much shorter with ILNPv6 (Section 6.1.4)

Summary

Introduction

Mobility is an increasingly important aspect of communication for the Internet. The usage of handheld computing devices, such as tablets and smartphones, is increasingly popular among Internet users. The current Internet Protocol, IP, was not originally designed to support mobility for mobile nodes (MNs) over the Internet. While the IETF Mobile IPv4 (MIPv4) [1] and Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) [2] solutions have been defined for some time and implementation is available, they have seen little deployment due to their complexity and performance. We describe and evaluate an implementation of a true end-to-end approach to mobility. Our mechanism uses ILNPv6, a superset of IPv6 that implements an Internet architecture described by the Identifier-Locator Network Protocol (ILNP). We present a testbed-based performance evaluation of ILNPv6 as an in-kernel modification to the Linux kernel (not a simulation). Using an unmodified TCP application, we show that our approach is fully backwards compatible with the existing sockets API and has better performance than MIPv6

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Discussion

Conclusion