Hand-off delay analysis in SIP-based mobility management in wireless networks

Recent years have seen a tremendous amount of effort toward the development of wireless Internet infrastructure and approaches to solve various problems associated with it. One of the major stumbling blocks is the mobility management in such an infrastructure. Several mobility management protocols have been proposed working at different layers of the protocol stack, but each comes with its own set of requirements and shortcomings. We observe that by and large the mobility requirements can be satisfied by using a simple application layer mobility management protocol. Although the session initiation protocol (SIP), originally developed as an application layer signaling protocol, offers mobility management capability, yet there are some associated delays that need careful investigation. In this paper, we study analytically the SIP based hand-off delay in third generation (3G) wireless networks. Our performance results conclude that in terms of hand-off delay, SIP is not suitable for supporting streaming media with stringent delay requirements.