A hierarchical mobility management framework for the Internet

Mobile IP is a mobility management protocol that has been designed to support mobile users in the Internet. As researchers are currently considering to use it in the third generation cellular system, it becomes clear that some kind of hierarchy is needed in Mobile IP to improve its scalability and its support for fast handoff control. Along this line, several proposals that separate the macro mobility management from the micro mobility management have been made recently. All these proposals agree that Mobile IP is a good protocol to support macro mobility but they all define their own micro mobility management protocol. As a result, a mobile host will need to understand the different micro mobility management protocols of the sites that it visits in order to stay connected. We argue that this approach is not practical and that a framework that allows the deployment of different micro mobility management protocol in different parts of the Internet while still providing seamless roaming to mobile users is needed. This paper present such a framework. We propose to decompose the Internet mobility management protocol into three components. The first one, the registration protocol, specifies the registration procedures between the mobile node and the domain it is attached to. It is standard and unique. The second one, the micro mobility protocol, manages local mobility and may differ from one domain to another. The third one, the macro mobility protocol, manages mobility across domains. We suggest to use Mobile IP as the macro mobility protocol.