A new scheme for reducing link and signaling costs in mobile IP

IP mobility support is provided by the basic Mobile IP protocol. The main drawback of the protocol is that the packets must be routed along the paths longer than the optimal one. This is known as the triangle routing problem. Recently, the route optimization protocol was proposed to solve the triangle routing problem, which allows packets to be routed along an optimal path from a correspondent node to a mobile node. However, the route optimization protocol may cause high signaling and processing costs. In this paper, a new scheme for reducing costs in route optimization is introduced to solve the above problems. Link and signaling cost functions are introduced to capture the trade off between the network resources consumed by the routing, signaling, and processing load incurred by the route optimization. In this new scheme, route optimization is performed only when it minimizes the total cost function, which provides the optimal result from the point of view of link and signaling costs. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides the best performance.

1 Introduction

IP mobility support is becoming very important as the Internet is growing fast, and the wireless communication technology is advancing. The basic Mobile IP protocol [1] was proposed to provide IP mobility support. It introduces three new functional entities: mobile node (MN), home agent (HA), and foreign agent (FA).