<title>Fast and effective wireless handoff scheme using forwarding pointers and hierarchical foreign agents</title>

Abstract

Mobile IP is used to keep track of location information and make data available to the Mobile Host (MH) anytime, anywhere. In order to maintain uniform connectivity during mobility of the MH from one cell to the next, handoff latency must be minimized. In Mobile IP, when the MH is in a foreign domain far away from its home domain and Home Agent (HA), latency for registrations is high. This latency implies that many data packets could be lost during handoff from one domain to another. Hierarchical mobility management and forwarding pointers are two methods of reducing handoff latency. We propose a mobility management scheme called Hierarchical mobility management with Forwarding Pointers (HFP), that combines the two methods. In HFP, when the MH moves within a foreign domain, registration requests are handled locally. When the MH moves from one foreign domain to another, forwarding pointers between the two domains are used to track the location of the MH and perform smooth handoff. We show that HFP performs better than hierarchical mobility management during inter-domain mobility and better than forwarding pointers during intra-domain mobility. Simulation results that validate the performance improvement are presented and discussed.