Nested Network Mobility on the Multihop Cellular Network

The multihop cellular network architecture has been actively studied due to its capability to significantly increase cellular system capacity and coverage, and at the same time greatly reduce the transmission range of mobile nodes. The majority of the literature on MCN, however, is based on discussions from the physical or link layer point of view. In this article we look at the logical MCN architecture from the IP layer aspect. We believe that this aspect is critical to general deployment of Internet applications on the MCN because IP is the dominant supporting protocol for such applications. We introduce a new architecture based on the integration of nested network mobility (nested NEMO), which is a pure IP layer architecture, and MCN. We name the resulting architecture nested NEMO on MCN. We illustrate how nested NEMO on MCN operates and how it realizes the advantages provided by MCN on the IP layer. We also unveil a potential problem specific to the nested NEMO on MCN architecture: recursive IP fragmentation. A simple technique to overcome this problem is proposed.