Simple mobility management protocol for global seamless handover

Abstract

Most of the current mobility management protocols such as the mobile IPv4 or mobile IPv6 and its variants standardized by the IETF do not support global seamless handover. This is because they require comprehensive changes in the existing network infrastructure. In this article, we propose a simple mobility management protocol (SMMP) which can support global seamless handover between homogeneous or heterogeneous wireless networks. The underlying principle of the SMMP is that it uses a separate location management function similar to the session initiation protocol (SIP) to support global user and service mobility. In addition, in the SMMP, bidirectional tunnels are dynamically constructed to support seamless Internet protocol (IP) mobility using the IEEE 802.21 media-independent handover (MIH) standards. The detailed architecture and functions of the SMMP have been designed. Finally, the simulation results, using network simulator NS-2, show that the proposed SMMP outperforms the existing MIPv6 and hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) in terms of handover latency, packet loss and pear signal noise ratio (PSNR).