Mobility Management in Mobile Hotspots with Heterogeneous Multihop Wireless Links

In this article we study two representative mobility management schemes for mobile hotspots with heterogeneous multihop wireless links: the NEMO basic support protocol at the network layer and the SIP-based network mobility support protocol at the application layer. We evaluate their salient features and quantify their handoff latency. It is shown that the SIP-based network mobility support protocol can easily be deployed and reduce the tunneling overhead incurred in the NEMO basic support protocol. However, it increases handoff latency due to longer message length. We also discuss several open research issues for seamless mobility support in mobile hotspots.