HiMIP-NEMO: Combining Cross-Layer Network Mobility Management and Resource Allocation for Fast QoS-Handovers

Network mobility introduces a new communication paradigm that provides sets of mobile hosts (MH) moved collectively as a unit with high-mobility. Efficient network mobility handover design is essential to meet QoS requirements for real-time VoIP-like applications. IETF MIPv6-NEMO design has some problems and introduces extra overheads on packet header and tunnel processing, and added transmission delays due to additional routing legs. Inflexible execution sequence between tasks in MIPv6-NEMO causes negative effect on handover latency performance. In this work, we combine the designs of routing and resource allocation with network mobility management, and introduce the notion of foreign mobility agent in a hierarchical backhaul packet forwarding architecture, referred to as HiMIP-NEMO, to facilitate QoS-handovers and reduce latency and packet loss during handover. Under the architecture, a QoS-incorporated registration protocol and handover protocol with several new layers 2 and 3 message types are also proposed. Both the analytical and simulation results are presented. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed integrated designs in the support of QoS-handover and significant improvements in latency and packet loss performances.