A case for mobility support with temporary home agents

ABSTRACT

The Mobile IP standard for mobility management on the Internet enables transparent communication between mobile hosts (MHs) and their correspondent hosts (CHs). However, it suffers from triangular routing and prolonged handoff latency problems. Solutions such as route optimization and micro-mobility protocols either solve these problems partially or require costly modifications to the CHs. In this paper, we propose to use temporary home agent (TA) to address both problems without requiring any special support on CHs. TA exploits the locality of user movement observed in recent studies for PCS and wireless data networks. It does so by dynamically selecting a Mobile IP home agent based on the location of the user. The TA allocates a temporary home address, THAddr to the MH, which the MH may use as its source address. The underlying objective is to shorten the distance between a MH and its home agent, which is a critical factor in reducing handoff latency and improving routing efficiency. Our scheme is shown to outperform Mobile IP and is comparable to route optimization (RO) through both quantitative analysis and ns simulations. While our approach focus on improving the performance for sessions that are initiated by the MH, methods for optimizing traffic handling for sessions initiated by CHs are discussed.

REFERENCES

• 1: C. E. Perkins, "IP mobility support." Request for Comments 2002, October 1996.
• 2: Ramón Cáceres , Venkata N. Padmanabhan, Fast and scalable handoffs for wireless internetworks, Proceedings of the 2nd annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.56-66, November 1996, Rye, New York, United States [doi>10.1145/236387.236405]
• 3: C. Castelluccia, "A Hierachical Mobile IPv6 Proposal." http://sirac.inrialpes.fr/Infos/Personnes/Claude.Castelluccia, November 1998.
• 4: R. Ramjee , T. La Porta , S. Thuel , K. Varadhan , S. Y. Wang, HAWAII: A Domain-Based Approach for Supporting Mobility in Wide-Area Wireless Networks, Proceedings of the Seventh Annual International Conference on Network Protocols, p.283, October 31-November 03, 1999
• 5: András G. Valkó, Cellular IP: a new approach to Internet host mobility, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, v.29 n.1, January 1999 [doi>10.1145/505754.505758]
• 6: UCB/LBNL/VINT, "Network simulator - ns (version 2)." http://www-mash.cs.berkeley.edu/ns/, January 2000.
• 7: C. E. Perkins and D. B. Johnson, "Route optimization in Mobile IP." draft-ietf-mobileip-optim-09.txt, February 2000.
• 8: Alex C. Snoeren , Hari Balakrishnan, An end-to-end approach to host mobility, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.155-166, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345938]
• 9: G. Kirby, "Locating the user," Communication International, 1995.
• 10: Diane Tang , Mary Baker, Analysis of a metropolitan-area wireless network, Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.13-23, August 15-19, 1999, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/313451.313460]
• 11: W. K. Grassman, "Transient solutions in markovian queueing systems," Comput. and Ops. Res., vol. 4, pp. 47-53, 1977.
• 12: D. Gross and D. R. Miller, "The randomization technique as a modeling tool and solution procedure for transient markov processes," Operations Research, vol. 32, March-April 1984.
• 13: P. Ferguson and D. Senie, "Network ingress filtering." RFC 2267, January 1998.
• 14: G. Montenegro, "Reverse tunneling for mobile IP." RFC 2344, May 1998.
• 15: Y. Ge, C. Liu, M. Fitz, J. Hou, W.-P. Chen, and R. Jain, "Osu narrow-band wireless modem testbed, version 1." Design document, February 2000.
• 16: B. Melamed and M. Yadin, "Randomization procedures in the computation of cumulative-time distributions over discrete state markov processes," Operat. Res., vol. 32, pp. 926-944, July-Aug. 1984.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.3 Other Architecture Styles
          Subjects: Cellular architecture (e.g., mobile)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications

          Nouns: Internet

General Terms:
Design, Performance