Novel and enhanced mobile Internet protocol for third generation cellular environments compared to MIP and MIP-LR

The mobile Internet protocol (MIP) is an extension for Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) providing the capability to move between IP subnets without losing any Internet connectivity, which is important for handoffs between cells in wireless environments. However, currently due to the design the MIP suffers from issues such as performance regarding handoffs and interoperability with protocols such as RSVP for providing quality of service (QoS). To overcome the problems of MIP the suggested architecture of Jain (see IEEE Transaction on Networking, 1999, and Proc. ICC'98, 1998) has been implemented, enhanced and tested on Windows 2000. We call this enhancement of MIP based on the solution using home location registries the Itinerant Internet Protocol (IIP). Tests show that IIP outperforms MIP in respect of handoffs. Its design does not require encapsulation and mobility agents like MIP. It does not suffer triangular routing and eliminates the necessity of periodic routing advertisement. Due to the design it is best suited to third generation wireless cellular networks such as UMTS. The cost of the advantages are that all hosts that want to communicate with the mobile hosts need to be mobile aware i.e. they need to have a mobile aware protocol stack implemented. We describe and compare MTP and ITP. The designed interaction of IIP used with UMTS is pointed out. We also present tests and discuss the results that prove the significant quicker handoffs of IIP compared to MIP.