Mobility management support and performance analysis for wireless MPLS networks

Multi‐Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) is deployed in the Internet backbone to support service differentiation and traffic engineering. In recent years, there has been interest in extending the MPLS capability to wireless access networks for mobility management support. In this paper, we present analysis of Micro Mobile MPLS, a new micro‐mobility management scheme which integrates the Mobile IP and MPLS protocols by using two‐level hierarchy architecture. Our proposal supports two protocol variants. First, the fast handoff process, which anticipates the LSP procedure set‐up with neighboring locations where a mobile node (MN) may move to, is provided to reduce service disruption. Second, a new mechanism based on the forwarding chain concept is proposed to track efficiently the host mobility within a domain. This concept can significantly reduce registration update costs and provide low handoff latency. Analytical models are developed and simulations are conducted to justify the benefits of our proposed mechanisms. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

DM3: distributed mobility management in MPLS‐based access networks

Over the last few years, mobility management in the Internet has been one of the most active fields in communications. The recent increasing mobile traffic demand is having an important impact on the design of mobile networks and some limitations are arising from traditional network deployments. In order to deal with this new scenario, mobility management network architectures are being redesigned towards a more distributed operation. In this paper, we introduce DM3 (distributed mobility management MPLS), a fully distributed architecture designed to track efficiently the mobility of users in the current paradigm of evolving mobile IP networks. In DM3 architecture, several nodes are distributed in the MPLS‐based access network and the mobile nodes are served by a close‐by mobility anchor. With this operation, we reduce the routing and registration update costs, and provide a low handoff latency with a minimal packet loss rate. Analytical and experimental results are presented to justify the benefits of our proposed architecture. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Robust Analytical Model of Mobile IP Handoff with Multiple Traffic Profiles

Mobile IP has been developed to provide the continuous information network access to mobile users. The performance of Mobile IP mobility management scheme is dependent on traffic characteristics and user mobility. Consequently, it is important to assess this performance in-depth through these factors. This paper introduces a novel analytical model of handoff management in mobile IP networks. The proposed model focuses on the effect the traffic types and their frame error rates on the handoff latency. It is derived based on general distribution of both successful transmission attempts and the residence time to be applicable in all cases of traffic characteristics and user mobility. The impact of the behavior of wireless connection, cell residence time, probability distribution of transmission time and the handoff time is investigated. Numerical results are obtained and presented for both TCP and UDP traffics. As expected, the reliability of TCP leads to higher handoff latency than UDP traffic. It is shown that, higher values of FER increase the probability of erroneous packet transfer across the link layer. A short retransmission time leads to end the connection most likely in the existing FA; however a long retransmission time leads to a large delivery time. The proposed model is robust in the sense that it covers the impact of all the effective parameters and can be easily extended to any distribution.     

Fast and reliable handoff for vehicular networks

A layer-3 mobility management scheme for an all-IP Wireless Access Network (WAN), and in particular for vehicular networks, is developed in this paper. The proposed method enables fast and reliable handoff. This feature is extremely important for high speed vehicular networks. Since vehicles are characterized by likely-predictable path, as well as very high speed, handoff events can and should be predicted in order to achieve fast and reliable handoff. As it is shown in this study, the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the packet loss ratio caused by frequent handoff events experienced by high speed vehicles. This scheme is topology-independent in the sense that it does not assume any network topology. The key idea is to use a topology-learning algorithm that enables to perform localized mobility management, by efficiently re-selecting a Mobility Anchor Point (MAP) node. The goal of the proposed scheme is to maintain a continues connection subject to user-dependent delay constraints, while minimizing the signaling cost and packet loss ratio associated with handoff events. This scheme is consistent with the existing mobility management schemes currently used in Mobile IP (MIP) and cellular networks, and it fits into the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) scheme defined in Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) for integrating mobile terminals with the Internet wired backbone.     

Multilayer Hierarchical Model for Mobility Management in IPv6: A Mathematical Exploration

The mobility solution provided by Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) imposes too much signaling load to the network and enforces large handoff latency to end user. Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) on the other hand, is designed by organizing MIPv6 in layered architecture and performs better than MIPv6 in terms of handoff latency and signaling load. Observation shows that, there is still possibility to shrink the handoff latency and the signaling load by further extending HMIPv6 into multiple layers. To explore this possibility of enhanced performance through layered architecture, this paper aimed at mathematical exploration of an N-layered MIPv6 network architecture in order to figure out the optimal levels of hierarchy for mobility management. A widespread analysis is carried out on various parameters such as location update frequency and cost, handoff latency and packet delivery cost. Influence of queuing delay on handoff latency is examined by modeling M/M/1/K queue in the architecture and user mobility is modeled using Markov chain. Analytical investigation reveals that three levels of hierarchy in MIPv6 architecture provide an optimal solution for mobility management.     

Intelligent Handoff for Mobile Wireless Internet

This paper presents an intelligent mobility management scheme for Mobile Wireless InterNet – MWIN. MWIN is a wireless service networks wherein its core network consisting of Internet routers and its access network can be built from any Internet-capable radio network. Two major standards are currently available for MWIN, i.e., the mobile IP and wireless LAN. Mobile IP solves address mobility problem with the Internet protocol while wireless LAN provides a wireless Internet access in the local area. However, both schemes solve problems independently at different layers, thereby some additional problems occur, e.g., delayed handoff, packet loss, and inefficient routing. This paper identifies these new problems and performs analyses and some real measurements on the handoff within MWIN. Then, a new handoff architecture that extends the features of both mobile IP and wireless LAN handoff mechanism was proposed. This new architecture consists of mobile IP extensions and a modified wireless LAN handoff algorithm. The effect of this enhancement provides a linkage between different layers for preventing packet loss and reducing handoff latency. Finally, some optimization issues regarding network planning and routing are addressed.     

一种基于无线局域网的移动检测优化方案

无线局域网采用移动IP实现移动性管理.移动IP切换存在切换时延大,数据包易丢失的问题.切换时延由移动检测时延和注册时延组成,而移动检测时延在其中占主要部分.文章提出了一种移动检测优化方案,采用了自适应绑定的算法,同时充分考虑了域内小范围高频度切换的情况,使移动节点在无线局域网环境中进行快速有效的切换.     

基于IPv6的快速切换改进方案

在移动IP网络中,当前的移动性管理方案由于其基本协议的切换时延较大、丢包率较高而不能适应实时业务和移动通信的要求,所以需要改善移动性管理策略的切换性能,尽量实现无缝切换和零丢包率。提出了一种基于移动IPv6的快速切换的改进方案,采用一种新的地址分配方式使得移动节点能够在移动至新的网络后迅速获取新的转交地址,有效地减少了切换所产生的时延和丢包率,具有较好的切换性能。     

Seamless Handoff Scheme Based on Pre-registration and Pre-authentication for UMTS–WLAN Interworking

Interworking issues between Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) and Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) have become a great matter of interest as an increasing number of mobile internet users require broadband wireless access to IP services in the wide area. In this paper, we present a practical UMTS–WLAN interworking architecture based on 3GPP standards and propose a seamless handoff scheme that guarantees low delay and low packet loss during UMTS–WLAN handoff. For low handoff delay, the proposed handoff scheme performs pre-registration and pre-authentication processes before layer 2 handoff. Moreover, it uses packet buffering and forwarding functions in order to reduce packet loss during the handoff period. On the above basis, detailed signaling procedures are presented, together with system requirements when a mobile terminal moves from UMTS to WLAN and vice-versa. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme performs well with respect to signaling cost, handoff delay, and packet loss compared with conventional schemes.     

Fast handover solution for network-based distributed mobility management in intelligent transportation systems

The current IP mobility protocols are called centralized mobility management (CMM) solutions, in which all data traffic and management signaling messages must be forwarded to an anchor entity. In some vehicle scenarios, vehicles may move as a group from one roadside unit to another (i.e., after traffic lights or traffic jams). This causes data traffic and exchanged mobility messages to peak at the anchor entity and, consequently, affects the network performance. A new design paradigm aimed at addressing the anchor entity issue is called distributed mobility management (DMM); it is an IETF proposal that is still being actively discussed by the IETF DMM working group. Nevertheless, network-based DMM is designed based on the well-known network-based CMM protocol Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). There is no significant difference between network-based DMM and PMIPv6 in terms of handover latency and packet loss. Because vehicles change their roadside unit frequently in this context, the IP addresses of mobile users (MUs) require fast IP handover management to configure a new IP address without disrupting ongoing sessions. Thus, this paper proposes the Fast handover for network-based DMM (FDMM) based on the Fast Handover for PMIPv6 (PFMIPv6). Several modifications to PFMIPv6 are required to adapt this protocol to DMM. This paper specifies the necessary extensions to support the scenario in which an MU has old IP flows and hence has multiple anchor entities. In addition, the analytic expressions required to evaluate and compare the handover performance of the proposed FDMM and the IETF network-based DMM have been derived. The numerical results show that FDMM outperforms the IETF network-based DMM in terms of handover latency, session recovery and packet loss at the cost of some extra signaling.     

一种移动IP快速平滑切换方案

无线IP网络中将采用移动IP实现移动性管理,但该方案应用在高频度切换环境,存在不可接受的切换时延和数据包丢失,很难保证通信业务的服务质量.提出了一种移动IP快速平滑切换方案,该方案利用后注册切换的概念,在切换过程中不存在数据包的丢失,并可以获得很小的切换时延,在实际系统中运行能够达到良好的效果.     

Fast and scalable wireless handoffs in support of mobile Internet audio

Future internetworks will include large numbers of portable devices moving among small wireless cells. We propose a hierarchical mobility management scheme for such networks. Our scheme exploits locality in user mobility to restrict handoff processing to the vicinity of a mobile node. It thus reduces handoff latency and the load on the internetwork. Our design is based on the Internet Protocol (IP) and is compatible with the Mobile IP standard. We also present experimental results for the lowest level of the hierarchy. We implemented our local handoff mechanism on Unix-based portable computers and base stations, and evaluated its performance on a WaveLAN network. These experiments show that our handoffs are fast enough to avoid noticeable disruptions in interactive audio traffic. For example, our handoff protocol completes less than 10 milliseconds after a mobile node initiates it. Our mechanism also recovers from packet losses suffered during the transition from one cell to another. This work helps extend Internet telephony and teleconferencing to mobile devices that communicate over wireless networks. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating IPv6 Based Mobility Management Protocols

Seamless mobility in future generation networks, which are envisioned to be heterogeneous in nature, is an important issue. While Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) work groups have standardized various mobility management protocols, such as Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6, a comprehensive study of these protocols in terms of various performance characteristics is a challenging issue. Moreover, this study also considers the recent proposals from IETF in distributed mobility management (DMM) protocols. In this paper, a novel analytical model is developed for comparison of various mobility management protocols in terms of handover latency, as well as packet density, and packet arrival rate during the handover time by applying transport engineering principles in the field of telecommunication. The signaling cost analysis using signaling overhead incurred during protocol operations is given for each of these protocols. The number of packets that can be lost during the handover operation is also obtained using this model. Moreover, it presents a unified framework using which one can assess the performance characteristics of both host based and network based mobile IP protocols. One can also assess the performance of centralized and DMM approaches. The correctness of the proposed model is established by the fact that it leads to results similar to those obtained by applying some of the existing models. At the same time, the model allows one to obtain additional results showing the effect of packet density and packet arrival rate on the handover latency.     

A Low Cost Route Optimization Scheme for Cluster-Based Proxy MIPv6 Protocol

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) is a network based mobility protocol which has been designed to relieve the mobile nodes (MNs) from participating in the mobility process and to reduce the long handoff latency of the MIPv6 protocol. However, PMIPv6 incurs a long communication path due to the triangle routing problem, in which, all packets sent by MNs are obligated to pass through the local mobility anchor. Several solutions have been proposed to mitigate this issue. However, they still incur high signaling overhead to recover the Route Optimization (RO) status after handoff. In this paper, we propose a Cluster-Based RO (CBRO) scheme for the clustered architecture of the PMIPv6, in which, the Mobile Access Gateways (MAGs) are grouped into clusters with a distinguished Head MAG (HMAG) for each. In the proposed CBRO, the RO process is relied on the HMAGs to reduce the handoff latency while achieving a fast recovery of the optimized path after handoff. The proposed CBRO is evaluated analytically and compared with the basic PMIP and the current RO schemes. The obtained numerical results have shown that the proposed CBRO outperforms all other schemes in terms of signaling cost required to recover the RO status after handoff and the total cost performance metrics.     

Mobility management in wireless ATM networks

Mobile ATM offers a common wired network infrastructure to support mobility of wireless terminals, independent of the wireless access protocol. In addition, it allows seamless migration to future wireless broadband services, such as wireless ATM, by enabling mobility of end-to-end ATM connections. In spite of the diversity in mobile networking technologies (e.g., cellular telephony, mobile-IP, packet data services, PCS), all of them require two fundamental mechanisms: location management and handoff. This article describes different schemes for augmenting a wired ATM network to support location management of mobile terminals and handoff protocols for rerouting a connection data path when the endpoint moves. A prototype implementation of mobile ATM integrating mobility support with ATM signaling and connection setup, is presented. It shows how mobile ATM may be used to provide mobility support to an IP terminal using non-ATM wireless access     

Signaling cost and performance of SIGMA: A seamless handover scheme for data networks

Mobile IP has been developed to handle mobility of Internet hosts at the network layer. Mobile IP (MIP), however, suffers from a number of drawbacks such as requirement of infrastructure change, high handover latency, high packet loss rate, and conflict with network security solutions. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the performance of SIGMA, a Seamless IP diversity‐based Generalized Mobility Architecture. SIGMA utilizes multihoming to achieve seamless handover of mobile hosts, and is designed to solve many of the drawbacks of MIP, including requirement for changes in infrastructure. We first evaluate the signaling cost of SIGMA and compare with that of hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (an enhancement of Mobile IP) by analytical modeling, followed by comparison of handover performance of SIGMA and Mobile IPv6 enhancements. Criteria for performance evaluation include handover latency, packet loss, throughput, and network friendliness. Our results indicate that in most cases SIGMA has a lower signaling cost than Hierarchical Mobile IPv6. Moreover, for a typical network configuration, SIGMA has a higher handover performance over Mobile IP. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Secure Relay-Assisted Handover Protocol for Proxy Mobile IPv6 in 3GPP LTE Systems

The LTE (Long Term Evolution) technologies defined by 3GPP is the last step toward the 4th generation (4G) of radio technologies designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile telephone networks. Mobility management for supporting seamless handover is the key issue for the next generation wireless communication networks. The evolved packet core (EPC) standard adopts the proxy mobile IPv6 protocol (PMIPv6) to provide the mobility mechanisms. However, the PMIPv6 still suffers the high handoff delay and the large packet lost. Our protocol provides a new secure handover protocol to reduce handoff delay and packet lost with the assistance of relay nodes over LTE networks. In this paper, we consider the security issue when selecting relay nodes during the handoff procedure. During the relay node discovery, we extend the access network discovery and selection function (ANDSF) in 3GPP specifications to help mobile station or UE to obtain the information of relay nodes. With the aid of the relay nodes, the mobile station or UE performs the pre-handover procedure, including the security operation and the proxy binding update to significantly reduce the handover latency and packet loss. The simulation results illustrate that our proposed protocol actually achieves the performance improvements in the handoff delay time and the packet loss rate.     

A novel distributed dynamic location management scheme for minimizing signaling costs in Mobile IP

Mobile IP is a simple and scalable global mobility solution. However, it may cause excessive signaling traffic and long signaling delay. Mobile IP regional registration is proposed to reduce the number of location updates to the home network and to reduce the signaling delay. This paper introduces a novel distributed and dynamic regional location management for Mobile IP where the signaling burden is evenly distributed and the regional network boundary is dynamically adjusted according to the up-to-date mobility and traffic load for each terminal. In our distributed system, each user has its own optimized system configuration which results in the minimal signaling traffic. In order to determine the signaling cost function, a new discrete analytical model is developed which captures the mobility and packet arrival pattern of a mobile terminal. This model does not impose any restrictions on the shape and the geographic location of subnets in the Internet. Given the average total location update and packet delivery cost, an iterative algorithm is then used to determine the optimal regional network size. Analytical results show that our distributed dynamic scheme outperforms the IETF Mobile IP regional registration scheme for various scenarios in terms of reducing the overall signaling cost.     

An Architecture and Communication Protocol for IPv6 Pack-Based Picocellular Networks

In this paper, micro mobility problems in handoff binding latency in Mobile IPv6 and the enhanced Cellular Mobile IPv6 (CMIv6) are investigated using a new extension protocol. Frequent and fast movements usually characterize micro mobility. An enhanced handoff extension is adopted to solve the Mobile IPv6 handoff break in a micro mobility environment. The basic idea involves using the new field in the IPv6 header, flow label, to assist the foreign router delivering packets to the mobile node. The Foreign Home Agent (FHA) is a new defined node in this proposition. FHA can accurately deliver packets according to the mobile node IP address even though the new binding messages have not arrived at the CN. The simulations shown in this paper prove that the enhanced CMIv6 scheme can minimize packet loss during handoffs.     

在基于MPLS的层次化移动IP网络中支持DiffServ的研究

MPLS支持DiffServ、流量工程,能为网络提供较好的QoS保证,而移动IP(MIP)能为移动设备提供较好的移动性支持。文章探讨了在无线接入网中MPLS和MIP结合实现DiffServ的方案,并给出了一种在基于MPLS的层次化MIP网络结构中支持DiffServ的体系结构,设计了其节点功能模型和关键协议。方案中利用了层次化结构的区域注册和重路由机制,减少了切换时延和网络的信令负荷。