A location management scheme for mobility support in wireless IP networks using session initiation protocol (SIP)

IP telephony has attracted significant interest due to the substantial cost savings that can be achieved, and the ubiquitous nature of IP in emerging network systems. The IETF has proposed a signalling protocol for IP telephony, the session initiation protocol (SIP). SIP provides not only basic signalling, but also the "hooks" necessary to support personal mobility. Therefore, we believe that SIP can be extended to support IP based mobile telephony services in next generation wireless networks. One of the primary extensions that is necessary is a location management capability. We propose a location management scheme for supporting personal mobility as well as user and device mobility in QoS enabled wireless IP networks to be used in conjunction with SIP. We also present a testbed implementation of the proposed scheme. Measured performance shows that the proposed scheme has much better performance than one publicly available Mobile IP implementation.