Realizing Fast Mobility and Multi-Homing Support in IP Wireless Access Networks

Abstract

The work described in this paper proposes and evaluates an end-to-end communication approach in realizing terminal mobility in IP wireless access networks. The proposed network architecture also provides a solution to multi-homing in IPv4 and IPv6 networks. It concentrates on end-to-end abstraction and does not require any special service from the underlay network infrastructure. The multi-homing capability is used to achieve seamless handoff. Based on multi-homing we also propose and evaluate a handoff scheme that exploits the overlapping coverage area and speed of the mobile node between sub-networks. We describe the network architecture and show its mobility and multi-homing capability by prototype implementation and by performance evaluation. Our implementation does not have any significant bad performance impact on plain versions of IPv4 and IPv6. The evaluation of handoff scheme shows that packet loss and handoff latency can be reduced significantly even with the end-to-end design, depending upon th...