Host mobility support for mobile computing over wide-area wireless data networks

Mobility management is a key component in allowing a computer to maintain normal communications with any nodes on the Internet while on the move, regardless of its point-of-attachment. One of the concerns raised with the current IETF Mobile IP standard is the quantity of signaling traffic generated for highly mobile computers, roaming over a wide-area network. This paper addresses this issue by investigating the impact of reducing the frequency at which a mobile host notifies its home network of its location, and taking advantage of the client-server interactions which exist in most network applications to provide a correspondent host with the mobile host's binding. These findings motivate an enhanced mobility management scheme, developed over Mobile IPv6 with several extensions and modifications. To evaluate the performance of the new scheme, we simulate typical Internet application sessions involving a mobile host and examine the amount of control traffic generated and the costs associated with routing data packets. Results show that the proposed scheme reduces the mobility management overhead without adversely affecting the routing efficiency.