Mobility management of interconnected virtual LANs over ATM networks

One of the most powerful virtual LAN (VLAN) features is the capability to group users into broadcast domains, which are independent of their locations on the physical network. This paper deals with VLAN services using ATM LAN emulation technology which operates on a client/server model, and focuses on the issues of supporting transparent VLAN services for mobile terminals. A mobile VLAN architecture is proposed to efficiently maintain multiple VLAN broadcast domains over ATM networks even if the topology is changed dynamically due to mobility. This architecture exploits a hypercube over tree (HOT) hierarchical structure, i.e., trees are connected in a hypercube manner, to interconnect different VLANs servers. To filter excessive server-to-server traffic, an intelligent frame forwarding algorithm is proposed for the servers. The proposed mobile VLAN system brings us a step closer towards facilitating mobility and conforms to existing LAN emulation environment.