Performance analysis of Mobile IP handoffs

The aim of this paper is to study the performance of Mobile IP hand-offs. It is determined that the key issue is the movement detection method (i.e. Lazy Cell Switching, Prefix-Matching, Eager Cell Switching). In this paper all three movement detection methods are studied. The study involves single agent subnetworks and simple movement patterns, i.e. straight movement from one subnetwork to another with no comeback. It is assumed that the wireless technology is unable to pass link-layer information to the IP layer and that it also restricts the mobile node from contemporarily participating in multiple subnetworks when in their overlap area (e.g. IEEE802.11). The principle findings are two formulas that determine the average mobile IP hand-off delay. These formulas are verified by real mobile IP hand-off results. It is also shown that Eager Cell Switching based Mobile IP hand-offs complete faster than their Lazy Cell Switching counterparts. Finally, it is shown that TCP communications suffer more than UDP communications because of the exponential back-off and the path maximum transmission unit discovery algorithms of TCP.