A seamless handoff approach of Mobile IP protocol for mobile wireless data networks

With recent advances in wireless communication technology, mobile computing is an increasingly important area of research. Enabling mobility in IP networks is a significant issue for making use of many portable devices appearing on the Internet. The IP mobility support being standardized in the IETF utilizes tunneling of IP packets from a home agent to a foreign agent to make the mobility transparent to the higher layer. We propose an approach to optimize the routing path and avoid the triangular routing problem in IP mobility, which is an extension of the Mobile IP architecture. We propose an efficient handoff scheme in which a routing table, called the mobile routing table (MRT), is designed in each edge router such as home agent, foreign agent and general router. A packet retransmission scheme is also proposed to reduce the packet loss during handoff. We analyze and compare both the standard Mobile IP and the proposed seamless handoff approach. Finally, the simulation results are presented.