End-to-end high performance mobility without infrastructure

Mobile IP offers disconnection free handoff by assuming availability of infrastructure. It requires intermediate software agents to be deployed in the Internet ahead of time. This infrastructure based mobility scheme though offers connectivity to itinerant hosts but incurs significant handoff and tunneling delays along with deployment costs. In this paper we investigate an alternate mobility scheme which does not require any such infrastructure and uses only end-point technique and interestingly provides much faster loss-free handoff. This end-to-end scheme named Interactive Protocol for Mobile Networks (IPMN) intelligently performs handoff based on information provided by MAC layer. The network address change is handled by renewing the existing connections by manipulating the TCP/IP stack at the end-points. It further uses a novel inter-protocol communication architecture to simplify end-point re engineering. However, it does not require any functional change in the TCP/IP protocol software. Besides, the difference in deployment scenarios, the IPMN offers blazingly fast event based handoff and much faster and simplified transport (no tunneling delay) than MIP. We provide a detail model based performance comparison between the two.