Micro-mobility Protocols Research Articles

Research on Handoff Delay and Mobility Management Cost of Mobility Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

An appropriate network model and some suitable performance evaluation criterions including handoff delay and mobility management cost were proposed in this paper. And in this base the performance of Mobile IP protocol and various micromobility protocols was comprehensively compared and investigated. The research results show that the performance is mainly influenced by two factors which are route update methods of mobility support protocols and mobile network parameters. The route update time and mobility management cost of micromobility protocol are obviously shorter than that of Mobile IP. In all researched micromobility protocols, the route update method of Mobile IP Regional Registration protocol has the optimal performance.

Proactive autonomic load uniformisation with mobility management for wireless Internet Protocol (IP) access networks

The agent micro-mobility protocols, such as Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6, have become leading contenders for providing micro-mobility support to mobile nodes (MNs). The presence of mobility agents (MAs) in these networks can lead to constrained routing and create areas of bottleneck around the MAs. When an MA is integrated in the access network all traffic is forced to flow through that MA potentially over-utilising paths along the MA, whereas other paths of the network remain under-utilised. For the efficient deployment of such networks, optimal and robust MA selection and load balancing mechanisms are required. This study introduces proactive autonomic load uniformisation, a self-managed load balancing scheme in which the congestion caused by MAs is reduced leading to better utilisation of the network resources. Assuming that the network supports multiple MAs, the proposed solution selects the optimal MAs by distributing optimally the incoming load within the network while at the same time maintaining the quality of service requirements for the MNs. The results show that the congestion is lowered by 25% within the network and the load is distributed uniformly across the MAs.

Performance evaluation of anycast-based micro-mobility management

The common goal of micro-mobility proposals is to minimise delay, signalling load and packet loss during handover. Most of the existing mobility management protocols rely on a hierarchical architecture, to reduce routing update latency. The main drawbacks of hierarchical architectures are their vulnerability to failures at higher levels of hierarchy and the increasing load of network nodes at these levels. The anycast-based micro-mobility protocol is not sensitive to node or link failure, since it contains no centralised database and the routing information is distributed among network nodes. Our solution is highly decentralised and uses an enhanced IP-based mobility detection method. The proposed scheme is independent of the radio layer and does not introduce any extra signalling load on the wireless interface. The signalling load introduced by the routing information updates is proportional to the number and speed of mobile nodes in the network.

Dynamic Mobility Anchor Selection Mechanism with QoS Constraints

The agent micro-mobility protocols such as Hierarchical Mobile IP and Network-based Localized Mobility Management (NetLMM) have become leading contenders for providing micro-mobility support to Mobile Nodes (MNs). For the efficient deployment of such protocols optimal and robust mobility agent selection mechanisms are required. In this Letter we propose a framework for optimal mobility agent selection by distributing the incoming load optimally whilst maintaining the QoS requirements for the Mobile Nodes. A binary linear integer program is formulated that takes into consideration the above mentioned criteria. The results show large improvement in terms of load distribution amongst the mobility agents.

Erratum to: Hybrid mobility management schemes integrating mobile IP and SIP for seamless invocation of services in All-IP network

The growing demand for seamless invocation of different multimedia services from handheld devices anytime anywhere is the main driving force for drawing attention in the area of mobility management. Although Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based mobility solution is very efficient for real-time services, Mobile IP is required to handle mobility of the mobile node (MN) at the network layer. We have extensively studied and explored some existing mobility management methods integrating the functionalities of Mobile IP and SIP in this paper. These schemes require support of IP encapsulation at the protocol stack of correspondent node (CN). To address the above problem, we have proposed in this paper, certain modification at the IP layer of Base Station (BS) that also reduces the bandwidth consumption. Moreover, service provisioning in a continuous way in public places like airport, university campus etc., requires to integrate some micro-mobility protocol with the existing mobility management methods to reduce the handoff disruption time in case of intradomain handoff. Thus, in this paper, we have proposed two new hybrid mobility management schemes that integrate two existing Mobile IP and SIP-based schemes where the proposed modification in the IP layer of BS is incorporated separately with the micro-mobility protocol Hierarchical Mobile IP (HMIP). The numerical results show that the integration of HMIP into the existing methods reduces both the signaling cost and the delay, mainly the active handoff disruption time. Simulation results on NS-2 demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed mobility management schemes over the existing methods in terms of handoff delay.

IP Paging for Mobile Hosts in Distributed and Fixed Hierarchical Mobile IP

The concept of Paging has been found useful in existing cellular networks for mobile users with low call-to-mobility ratio (CMR). It is necessary for fast mobility users to minimize the signaling burden on the network. Reduced signaling, also, conserves scarce wireless resources and provides power savings at user terminals. However, Mobile IP (MIP), a base protocol for IP mobility, does not support paging concept in its original form. Several paging schemes and micro-mobility protocols, centralized and distributed, have been proposed in literature to alleviate the inherent limitations of Mobile IP. In this paper, the authors propose three paging schemes for Distributed and Fixed Hierarchical Mobile IP (DFHMIP) and develop analytical models for them. Performance evaluations of these schemes have been carried out and results have been compared with DFHMIP without paging and with Dynamic Hierarchical Mobile IP (DHMIP) for low CMR values.

Performance analysis of the Cellular IP mobility protocol

The search for a suitable micromobility protocol which will inter-work with Mobile IP in 3G mobile networks has been the subject of intense research. Several proposals have been analyzed and comparisons carried out [1]. Cellular IP is a strong contender to take the seat as the chosen micromobility protocol, and its performance has been characterized mainly with Columbia IP Micromobility Software (CIPMS) under diverse scenarios. Previous analyses have considered generic TCP and UDP traffic. In the work presented here, a Cellular IP based 3G network model is developed, and services (voice, and web) are represented after probabilistic behaviors to conform, respectively, to a GSM coder, and web content comprised of packets, objects, and pages. In this way a more accurate knowledge of Cellular IP performance can be obtained.

A survey of integrating IP mobility protocols and mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an infrastructureless, autonomous, and standalone network. A MANET can be flexibly and simply deployed in almost any environment, but it has limited wireless coverage and its connectivity is limited to the MANET boundary. The growth of the Internet and its services and applications - and the trend in the fourth generation (4G) wireless networks toward All-IP networks - have led to an increasing demand for enabling MANET nodes to connect to the Internet and use its services and applications. Mobile IP and IP micromobility protocols enable a mobile node to access the Internet and change its access point without losing the connection. The mobile node should be in the coverage range of the access point and should have a direct connection to it. So, with the cooperation between MANET routing protocols and the IP mobility protocol, Internet connectivity to MANET nodes can be achieved. Many solutions have been proposed to enable MANETs to connect to the Internet using IP mobility protocols. This article presents a survey of solutions for integrating MANETs with the Internet, with the intent of serving as a quick reference to current research proposals for Internet connectivity for mobile ad hoc networks based on IP mobility protocols. A qualitative comparison of the routing solutions for integration is presented. The limitations of these integration solutions are also investigated. A framework for integrating the Cellular IP access network and MANETs is introduced. This survey concludes with further points for investigation.

Advances in IP Micromobility Management Using a Mobility-Aware Routing Protocol

Several micromobility schemes have been proposed to augment Mobile IP and provide a faster and smoother handoff than what is achievable by Mobile IP alone, the majority of which can be categorized into either “network prefix-based” or “host-specific forwarding” mobility management protocols, depending on the routing method used. This letter proposes a mobility-aware routing protocol (MARP) which makes use of both of these routing methods using dynamic IP address allocation. Its performance is evaluated and compared against hierarchical Mobile IP (HMIP) and Cellular IP based on handoff performance, end-to-end delivery delay, and scalability. The results demonstrate that MARP is a more robust, flexible, and scalable micromobility protocol, minimizes session disruption, and offers improvements in handoff performance.

On the design of mobility management scheme for 802.16-based network environment

In this paper, we investigate the characteristics of IEEE 802.16 and conclude that it is better to equip BS (base station) and SS (subscriber station) with Layer 3 functionality. Therefore, an 802.16 network can act as the backbone network of different subnets for better deployment. Based on the two IEEE Specifications, 802.16-2004 and 802.16e, we propose two kinds of paradigms of the 802.16 network technology for mobile networking. In the first paradigm, a novel concept called middle-domain mobility management in between macro- and micro-domain for 802.16-2004 is proposed. The management scheme of middle-domain is designed to accommodate different micro-mobility protocols in an 802.16-2004 network environment. Moreover, a mathematical analysis and simulation study are presented for performance evaluation. In the second paradigm, by comparing with traditional overlay networks (e.g. GPRS/WLAN), we have found that the characteristics for the 802.16e/802.11 overlay network are actually different from traditional overlay networks. To provide more efficient vertical handoff, a novel protocol called speed-based vertical handoff scheme (SVH) is proposed. A Simulation study has demonstrated that SVH can achieve a better performance than its WLAN-first counterpart in terms of less signaling and fewer packet losses.

Impact of the access network topology on the handoff performance

Micromobility protocols such as Cellular IP, Hawaii and Hierarchical Mobile IP are developed to solve problems of high handoff latency and control overhead, which occur when Mobile IP is used in combination with frequent handoffs. Up to now, tree access network topologies are considered to evaluate the protocol performance. However, for reasons of robustness against link failures and load balancing, extra uplinks and mesh links in the topology are desired. This article makes a classification of several topology types and gives a model that points out to which extent the topology influences the protocol performance in terms of handoff latency and handoff packet loss. Simulations confirm the results calculated by the model. Performance metrics such as load balancing, end-to-end delay and robustness against link failures are also evaluated. The study points to several shortcomings of the existing micromobility protocols for different topology types. Several aspects of the studied handoff schemes, their advantages and drawbacks are identified.

Micro mobility in the IP networks

Wireless access to Internet services will become typical, rather than the exception as it is today. Such a vision presents great demands on mobile networks. Mobile IP represents a simple and scalable global mobility solution but lacks the support for fast handoff control and paging found in cellular telephony networks. In contrast, second- and third-generation cellular systems offer seamless mobility support but are built on complex and costly connection-oriented networking infrastructure that lacks the inherent flexibility, robustness, and scalability found in IP networks. This paper presents an overview and performance comparison of two of the main micro-mobility protocols, namely Cellular IP and Hierarchical Mobile IP with regards to the handoff process for UDP applications. The differences in the handoff quality of the two protocols are small and can be traced to design choices within the typical model. There are however significant differences regarding the processing requirement, routing efficiency and parameters relating to implementation and deployment.

SmartAR: A PSEUDO- END-TO-END APPROACH FOR IP MICRO-MOBILITY

Nowadays, we can count several proposals about the micro-mobility problem in IP networks. In this paper, we try to summarize current proposals by means of a general classification scheme. Our taxonomy permits to identify pros and cons of current IP micromobility protocols. This classification should help understanding that e2e solutions do not cope with simultaneous movements of mobile nodes, and thus a mixed scheme would be better. Here, we design a new scheme, namely the smartAR scheme, which reduces network complexity and endures both single and simultaneous movements scenario. Moreover, we provide the classification of the IP micro-mobility protocols with a simple analysis of the hand-off latencies.

Study on Mobility Management Cost of Mobility Support Protocols

The mobility management cost of mobility support protocols is studied. Firstly a suitable network model is proposed and the signaling overhead brought to network in order to support MHs' (mobile host) mobility using various mobility support protocols is analyzed theoretically. On this base, a numerical simulation method is applied to compare the signaling overhead when only using mobile IP with introducing hierarchical mobility and when applying different micro-mobility protocols such as MIP-RR, CIP and HAWAII. The results show that introducing hierarchical mobility decreases the network signaling overhead observably comparing with only using mobile IP. In different micro-mobility protocols, the route maintenance strategy of deleting old routes explicitly brings less signaling overhead than frequently sending refresh messages periodically, and the route update method of sending route update messages to crossover MRA (mobile routing Agent) brings less signaling overhead than sending messages to GW (gateway).

Q-MEHROM: Mobility support and resource reservations for mobile senders and receivers

The increasing use of wireless networks and the popularity of multimedia applications, lead to the need for Quality of Service support in a Mobile IP-based environment. This paper investigates the reservation of resources for mobile receivers as well as senders in combination with micromobility support. We present Q-MEHROM, which is the close coupling between the micromobility protocol MEHROM and a resource reservation mechanism. In case of handoff, Q-MEHROM updates the routing information and allocates the resources for a sending or receiving mobile host simultaneously. Invalid routing information and reservations along the old path are explicitly deleted. Resource reservations along the part of the old path that overlaps with the new path are reused. Q-MEHROM uses access network topology and link state information calculated by QOSPF. Simulation results show that the control load is limited. Moreover, it consists mainly of QOSPF traffic and it is influenced by the handoff rate in the network. Q-MEHROM makes real use of the mesh links and extra uplinks, which are present in the access network to increase the robustness against link failures, to reduce handoff packet loss and to improve the performance for highly asymmetric network loads. Also, attention is paid to the differences between the mobile sender and the mobile receiver scenario.

Bridging the generation gap

The demand for mobile service increase many service providers which they start finding solutions for integrating third and fourth generation networks and to develop mobility protocols. This article introduces the macromobility, micromobility, and ad hoc routing protocols the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has discussed. The aim is to familiarize readers with various mobility protocols, point out differences, and generate interest to pursue research. Cellular IP can perform handoffs in a number of ways, and it uses an efficient paging technique. To achieve this, it uses two mappings: paging cache (PC) and routing cache (RC). PCs are used only to search for (mobile node) MNs while RCs are used to route data to the MNs. Micromobility protocols complement MIP by reducing signaling overheads and enabling faster handoffs for seamless connectivity. These protocols handle local movements of MN without any interaction with MIP. It reduces the bandwidth consumption and another advantage of reducing signaling overheads is that it helps to conserve the power reserves of MNs.

Support of Micro-Mobility in MPLS-Based Wireless Access Networks

In this paper, we propose an architecture for the MPLS (Multi-Protocol Label Switching)-based micro-mobility management including label switched path setup, packet forwarding, handoff processing, and paging. In order to prevent packet loss during handoff, we propose two packet recovery mechanisms, namely: buffer time-based packet recovery and medium access control (MAC) layer assisted packet recovery schemes. Simulation results show that the MAC layer assisted packet recuvery scheme has a better performance than buffer time-based scheme. Our proposed scheme provides a higher throughput when compared with other IP micro-mobility protocols including Cellular IP, HAWAII, and Hierarchical Mobile IP.

Specification and Performance Evaluation of a Micromobility Protocol Based on Multicast Transmission

With the aim of improving the performance of Mobile IPv4, there have been developed different proposals based on the concep of micromobility. This paper introduces a movel micromobility system based on multicast transmission. We propose different handover schemas for this system and, for each of them, we have develop a simple analytical model which allows to evaluate the performance in terms of packet-loss.

IP handover delay for host-based micromobility protocols

As mobile access networks evolve towards full IP solutions, there is an increasing need for understanding and designing their architecture. An analytical expression is introduced, for the average IP handover delay seen by a user, when in the IP mobile access network a host-based micromobility protocol is used.

Investigation on Handoff Performance of Mobility Support Protocols

Handoff is an important research topic of mobility support protocols. It has great effects on the performance and quality-of-service of mobile networks. Based on appropriate network model and handoff model, the handoff performance of various mobility support protocols is deeply studied and compared through theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. The comparisons are made between mobile IP and micro-mobility protocol, and between different micro-mobility protocols. The results show that wireless network parameters and route update algorithms of mobility support protocols affect the handoff performance. The handoff performance when applying micro-mobility protocols is better than when only using Mobile IP. In all micro-mobility protocols, the route update