Signaling cost evaluation of SIGMA

Abstract

Mobile IP (MIP) [1] is the standard proposed by IETF to handle mobility of Internet hosts for mobile data communication. Several drawbacks exist when using MIP in a mobile computing environment, the most important issues of MIP identified to date are high handover latency, and high packet loss rate. Even with various recent proposed enhancements such as HMIPv6, FMIPv6, Mobile IP still can not completely remove the latency associated handover, and the resulting packet loss rate is still high [2]. A number of transport layer mobility protocols have been proposed in the context of TCP, for example, MSOCKS and connection migration solution. These protocols tried to implement mobility as an end-to-end service without the requirement on the network layer infrastructures; they are not aimed at reducing the high latency and packet loss resulted from handovers. The handover latency for these schemes is in the scale of seconds. We designed a new scheme for supporting low latency, low packet loss mobility called Seamless IP diversity based Generalized Mobility Architecture (SIGMA) [3]. SIGMA relies on the signaling message exchange between the MH, correspondent node (CN), and location manager (LM). For every handover, MH need to send binding update and location update to CN and LM, respectively. For SIGMA to be useful in real world wireless system, all these signaling messages should not cost too much network bandwidth to leave no space for payload data transmission. The signaling cost analysis for MIP protocols are presented earlier in [4], [5], but there is no work done in extensively analyzing the signaling cost of transport layer mobility solutions. The objective of this paper is to look into the signaling cost required by SIGMA. The contributions of our paper can be outlined as follows: