TMSP: Terminal Mobility Support Protocol

Mobile IP enables IP mobility support for mobile node (MN), but it suffers from triangular routing, packet redirecting, increase in IP header size, and the need for new infrastructure support. This paper details an alternative to enable terminal mobility support for MN. This scheme does not suffer from triangular routing effect and does not require dedicated infrastructure support such as home agent. It also does not increase the size of the IP header and does not require redirection of packets. These benefits are enabled with a tradeoff, which requires modifications on MN and its correspondent node. It uses an innovative IP-to-IP address mapping method to provide IP address transparency for applications and taps on the pervasiveness of SIP as a location service. From our analysis, we show that TMSP is much more efficient than mobile IP in terms of the number of hops as well as overhead. Our prototype implementation also shows that TMSP provides seamless communication for both TCP and UDP connections and the computational overhead for TMSP has minimal impact on packet transmission.