A Case Study for Mobility Management Protocol Co-existence

Most existing mobility management protocols can be broadly categorized into three major categories: higher level protocols (e.g. SIP, SLM, MSOCKS, TCP migrate, freeze TCP, L7-mobility etc), lower level protocols (e.g. LWAPP, IAPP, MIP, CIP, HMIP, LIN6 etc) and middle layer protocols (e.g. HIP, MAST, MOBIKE etc). In general, lower layer protocols handle device mobility without affecting the higher layers. The higher layer protocols manage the mobility at the socket level and may also support session mobility. The middle layer protocols are targeted to provide loose coupling between higher and lower layer protocols, so that changes in lower layers are invisible to the higher layers and vice versa. All these protocols have their strengths and weaknesses and most try to give a complete mobility solution without considering services provided by other mobility management protocols. Therefore, in this paper we introduce a notion of "mobility enabled protocol stack" based on the concept of mobility management protocol coexistence. We argue that mobility management is a requirement and every layer in the OSI stack has its own responsibility to fulfill this requirement. In order to support our argument in this paper we present a case study for co-existence of host identity protocol (HIP) and session layer mobility (SLM) to provide a complete mobility solution.