Domain based approach for QoS provisioning in Mobile IP

Mobile IP (MIP) is proposed to ensure packet routing to a mobile host in the Internet regardless of the attachment point. MIP defines two functional entities, home agent (HA) and foreign agent (FA) to manage the mobile host location. Also, MIP defines the tunneling mechanism to deliver packets that are destined for the mobile node's home address. This tunneling mechanism has difficulties in adapting to the IntServ and DiffServ Internet service architectures. Since both services identify the service session as three-tuples - destinations IP address, IP protocol number and destination port - a new different service session must be defined over the IP tunnel. Current MIP QoS works concentrate on how to guarantee QoS over the IP tunnel and map it to the end-to-end service session, but seem to neglect the host mobility supporting protocol. We regard this protocol as an important factor. The current protocol has a hierarchical architecture with both micro and macro mobility. So, if MIP QoS can be organized in the same hierarchical architecture, better QoS can be obtained. Since MIP can support host mobility in a macro network, IntServ and Diffserv must be applied in this section. However, since several schemes are proposed to support fast handoff in the micro level, several QoS mechanisms may be applied in this level. This paper specifics a hierarchical scheme which uses not only aggregate RSVP flows between domain level agents, but also a specific local policy between domain level agent and mobile host in a domain.