Enhancement of Return Routability Mechanism for Optimized‐NEMO Using Correspondent Firewall

Network Mobility (NEMO) handles mobility of multiple nodes in an aggregate manner as a mobile network. The standard NEMO suffers from a number of limitations, such as inefficient routing and increased handoff latency. Most previous studies attempting to solve such problems have imposed an extra signaling load and/or modified the functionalities of the main entities. In this paper, we propose a more secure and lightweight route optimization (RO) mechanism based on exploiting the firewall in performing the RO services on behalf of the correspondent nodes (CNs). The proposed mechanism provides secure communications by making an authorized decision about the mobile router (MR) home of address, MR care of address, and the complete mobile network prefixes underneath the MR. In addition, it reduces the total signaling required for NEMO handoffs, especially when the number of mobile network nodes and/or CNs is increased. Moreover, our proposed mechanism can be easily deployed without modifying the mobility protocol stack of CNs. A thorough analytical model and network simulator (Ns‐2) are used for evaluating the performance of the proposed mechanism compared with NEMO basic support protocol and state‐of‐the‐art RO schemes. Numerical and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed mechanism outperforms other RO schemes in terms of handoff latency and total signaling load on wired and wireless links.     

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.     

Handoffs in Cellular Wireless Networks: The Daedalus Implementation and Experience

Network protocols in cellular wireless data networks must update routes as a mobile host moves between cells. These routing updates combined with some associated state changes are called handoffs. Most current handoff schemes in wireless networks result in data loss or large variations in packet delivery times. Unfortunately, many applications, such as real-time multimedia applications and reliable transport protocols, adapt to long term estimates of end-to-end delay and loss. Violations and rapid fluctuations of these estimates caused by handoff processing often result in degraded performance. For example, loss during handoff adversely affects TCP performance [4], and high packet loss and variable delays result in poor real-time multimedia performance. In this paper, we describe a multicast-based protocol that eliminates data loss and incurs negligible delays during a handoff. The basic technique of the algorithm is to anticipate a handoff using wireless network information in the form of received signal strengths and to multicast data destined for the mobile host to nearby base stations in advance. This routing, combined with intelligent buffering techniques at the base stations, enables very rapid routing updates and eliminates data loss without the use of explicit data forwarding. We have implemented this protocol using IP Multicast and Mobile IP-like routing. In our implementation, handoffs typically take between 8 and 15 ms to complete and result in no data loss.     

Route Optimization in Nested NEMO: Classification, Evaluation, and Analysis from NEMO Fringe Stub Perspective

Mobile IP is the basic solution to providing host mobility, whereas network mobility (NEMO) refers to the concept of the collective mobility of a set of nodes. The NEMO basic support protocol has been proposed in IETF as a first solution to the problem of network mobility. The main limitation of this basic solution is that it forces triangular routing, i.e., packets are always forwarded through the home agent (HA), following a suboptimal path. This is because each sub-NEMO obtains a care of address (CoA) that belongs to the home prefix of its parent mobile router. Such a CoA is not topologically meaningful in the current location, since the parent mobile router could also be away from home, and hence, packets addressed to the CoA are forwarded through the HA of the parent NEMO. To solve this problem, various extended proposals, with differing approaches and goals, exist for route optimization (RO) in NEMO applications. Their influences on the RO performance have been evaluated by classifying the detailed operations performed within the nested NEMO network, and then each category is analyzed in detail. The modeling of the detailed RO operation is intended to quantify the tradeoffs between the different approaches in order to provide a basis for the selection decision. In particular, the proposed grouping of the different proposals, based on their address configuration strategy, clarifies their similarities and differences, and provides some useful insights into the various methods that have been developed. In conclusion, it is suggested that, when choosing a solution for deploying NEMO, the designer has to balance his choices between the different pros and cons, and the different cases of application that are derived in this paper.     

Performance of Prefix Delegation-Based Route Optimization Schemes for NEMO

A number of prefix delegation-based schemes have been proposed in the literature to solve the route optimization problem in NEMO, where a group of hosts move together as a mobile network. The route optimization solutions generate different amounts of overheads that depend on the characteristics of the mobile network and mobility parameters. The overheads limit performance, giving rise to the need to carry out a comparative performance evaluation of the schemes to aid in the selection of a scheme; currently there is no tool which can aid in the selection. The objective of this paper is to develop analytical models to allow comparison among the schemes, and selection of an appropriate scheme for a given mobility scenario and mobile network characteristics. Results show that a single scheme does not suit all mobility scenarios and network characteristics. Selection of a scheme should, therefore, consider adaptation to the scenario and characteristics. The schemes could also be extended to dynamically adapt to changing scenario and characteristics.     

一种基于移动IPv6协议的软切换实现方案

移动IPv6协议解决了IPv6网络中移动节点的位置更新和路由可达问题,使移动节点能够在不同IPv6子网间进行切换而不中断当前连接。但是这种切换的时延较长,影响移动IPv6网络的性能。为了减少切换时延,文章在移动IPv6协议中引入软切换技术,提出一种采用绑定更新计时器和路由优先级变换机制的软切换工程实现方案,实验结果表明,该软切换方案可以有效提高移动IPv6网络的性能。     

Performance Analysis of Handoff Techniques Based on Mobile IP, TCP-Migrate, and SIP

Mobility management protocols operating from different layers of the classical protocol stack (e.g., link, network, transport, and application layers) have been proposed in the last several years. These protocols achieve different handoff performance for different types of applications. In this paper, mobile applications are grouped into five different classes, class A through class E, based on their mobility management requirements. Analytical models are developed to investigate the handoff performance of the existing mobility management protocols for these application classes. The analysis shows that applications of a particular class experience different handoff performance when different mobility management protocols are used. Handoff performance comparisons of different mobility management protocols are carried out to decide on the suitable mobility management protocol for a particular application class. The results of mathematical analysis advocate the use of transport layer mobility management for class B and class C applications, mobile IP for non-real-time class D and class E applications, and session initiation protocol-based mobility management for real-time class D and class E applications. Moreover, through analytical modeling, the parameters that influence the handoff performance of mobility management protocols are identified. These parameters can be used to design new application-adaptive techniques to enhance the handoff performance of the existing mobility management protocols.     

Multicasting with selective delivery: a SafetyNet for vertical handoffs

In the future, mobility support will require handling roaming in heterogeneous access networks. In order to enable seamless roaming it is necessary to minimize the impact of the vertical handoffs. Localized mobility management schemes such as Fast Handovers for Mobile IPv6 (FMIPv6) and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 do not provide sufficient handoff performance, since they have been designed for horizontal handoffs. In this paper, we propose the SafetyNet protocol, which allows a Mobile Node to perform seamless vertical handoffs. Further, we propose the SafetyNet handoff timing algorithm, to enable a Mobile Node to delay or even completely avoid upward vertical handoffs. We implement the SafetyNet protocol and compare its performance with the FMIPv6 protocol in our wireless test bed and analyze the results. The experimental results indicate that the proposed SafetyNet protocol can provide an improvement of up to 95% for TCP performance in vertical handoffs, when compared with FMIPv6 and an improvement of 64% over FMIPv6 with bicasting. We use numerical analysis of the protocol to show that its over the air signaling and data transmission overhead is comparable to FMIPv6 and significantly smaller than that of FMIPv6 with bicasting.     

A Lightweight NEMO Protocol to Support 6LoWPAN

The Network Mobility (NEMO) and IPv6 over Low power WPAN (6LoWPAN) protocols are the two most important technologies in current networking research and are vital for the future ubiquitous environment. In this paper, we propose a compressed packet header format to support the mobility of 6LoWPAN. Also, a Lightweight NEMO protocol is proposed to minimize the signaling overhead between 6LoWPAN mobile routers and 6LoWPAN gateways by using a compressed mobility header. Performance results show that our Lightweight NEMO protocol can minimize total signaling costs and handoff signaling delay.     

Fast Handoff in SIP-Based Next Generation Mobile Networks

It is commonly held that next generation mobile systems will be developed on the Internet in combination with diverse access technologies, as the future network architecture will be the coming together of various overlapping wireless access networks. Integrating various wireless networks in future heterogeneous networking environments poses many difficulties, the most critical challenge of which is efficient support for seamless mobility. SIP is a promising nominee for managing mobility in heterogeneous networks as it provides mobility within the application layer and the characteristics of the lower layer protocols are invisible to it. However, the performance of SIP-based mobility management is downgraded, resulting from its adoption of TCP/UDP for signaling and its strict separation between the lower layers and the application layer of the protocol stack. In this paper, a SIP-based cross-layer design for fast handoffs is proposed to shorten the service interruption time when a mobile node crosses the overlapped area of a WLAN/3G cellular system. As will be shown by the simulation results, the SIP-based solution proposed in this paper effectively lessens the handoff delays caused by either the horizontal handoff or vertical handoff in future all-IP heterogeneous wireless networks.     

Immune optimization algorithm for solving vertical handoff decision problem in heterogeneous wireless network

In heterogeneous wireless network environment, wireless local area network (WLAN) is usually deployed within the coverage of a cellular network to provide users with the convenience of seamless roaming among heterogeneous wireless access networks. Vertical handoffs between the WLAN and the cellular network maybe occur frequently. As for the vertical handoff performance, there is a critical requirement for developing algorithms for connection management and optimal resource allocation for seamless mobility. In this paper, we develop a mathematical model for vertical handoff decision problem, and propose a multi-objective optimization immune algorithm-based vertical handoff decision scheme. The proposed scheme can enable a wireless access network not only to balance the overall load among all base stations and access points but also maximize the collective battery lifetime of mobile terminals. Results based on a detailed performance evaluation study are also presented here to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme.     

Pre-scan based fast handoff scheme for enterprise IEEE 802.11 networks

In IEEE 802.11 networks, many access points (APs) are required to cover a large area due to the limited coverage range of APs, and frequent handoffs may occur while a station (STA) is moving in an area covered by several APs. However, traditional handoff mechanisms employed at STAs introduce a few hundred milliseconds delay, which is far longer than what can be tolerated by some multimedia streams such as voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), it is a challenging issue for supporting seamless handoff service in IEEE 802.11 networks. In this paper, we propose a pre-scan based fast handoff scheme within an IEEE 802.11 enterprise wireless local area network (EWLAN) environment. The proposed scheme can help STA obtain the best alternative AP in advance after the pre-scan process, and when the handoff is actually triggered, STA can perform the authentication and reassociation process toward the alternative AP directly. Furthermore, we adopt Kalman filter to minimize the fluctuation of received signal strength (RSS), thus reducing the unnecessary pre-scan process and handoffs. We performed simulations to evaluate performance, and the simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the handoff delay.     

An Efficient Multicast Routing Protocol in Wireless Mobile Networks

Providing multicast service to mobile hosts in wireless mobile networking environments is difficult due to frequent changes of mobile host location and group membership. If a conventional multicast routing protocol is used in wireless mobile networks, several problems may be experienced since existing multicast routing protocols assume static hosts when they construct the multicast delivery tree. To overcome the problems, several multicast routing protocols for mobile hosts have been proposed. Although the protocols solve several problems inherent in multicast routing proposals for static hosts, they still have problems such as non-optimal delivery path, datagram duplication, overheads resulting from frequent reconstruction of a multicast tree, etc. In this paper, we summarize these problems of multicast routing protocols and propose an efficient multicast routing protocol based on IEFT mobile IP in wireless mobile networks. The proposed protocol introduces a multicast agent, where a mobile host receives a tunneled multicast datagram from a multicast agent located in a network close to it or directly from the multicast router in the current network. While receiving a tunneled multicast datagram from a remote multicast agent, the local multicast agent may start multicast join process, which makes the multicast delivery route optimal. The proposed protocol reduces data delivery path length and decreases the amount of duplicate copies of multicast datagrams. We examined and compared the performance of the proposed protocol and existing protocols by simulation under various environments and we got an improved performance over the existing proposals.     

A Location Aware Mobility based Routing Protocol for the Bluetooth Scatternet

Bluetooth is a most promising technology designed for the wireless personal area networks for the cable replacement. In this paper, a location aware mobility based routing scheme for the Bluetooth scatternet is proposed that constructs the links dynamically. Our proposed routing protocol requires location information of the nodes and constructs the route between any source and destination and reduces the number of hops. Besides, the network routing problems are analyzed and role switch operations are proposed to mitigate the problems. Moreover, the roles switch and route optimization operations are also proposed to improve route performance. Rigorous simulation works are done to evaluate the performance of our protocol in terms of mobility speed and number of mobile nodes and to compare our results with similar Bluetooth routing protocols. It is observed that our protocol outperforms in terms of energy consumption and transmission packet overheads as compared to similar Bluetooth routing protocols.

Micro-mobility mechanism for smooth handoffs in an integrated ad-hoc and cellular IPv6 network under high-speed movement

The success of the Internet has attracted more people to take part in network navigation. Numerous wireless-communication devices have rapidly evolved in the past decade. The demand for mobile communications is increasing and packet data services through Internet protocol (IP) networks have become a trend. To supply more IP addresses to network devices and improve network performance, a new IP version 6 (IPv6) was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force in 1994. IPv6 supports certain features that make mobility management more efficient in mobile IP. A cellular architecture is needed to improve the communications quality and to reduce power consumption, both at the base and mobile stations. In a cellular environment, handoffs occur frequently. Reducing the defects caused by handoffs is extremely important in the mobile network environment. This is especially important for high-speed moving devices. In this paper, a handoff strategy called neighbor-assisted agent architecture, which takes advantage of the ad-hoc network to improve handoff performance, is proposed. Timing analytical and simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can provide a better solution than mobile IP for handoff breaks during high-speed movement.     

Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Route Optimization Solution for NEMO

An important requirement for Internet protocol (IP) networks to achieve the aim of ubiquitous connectivity is network mobility (NEMO). With NEMO support we can provide Internet access from mobile platforms, such as public transportation vehicles, to normal nodes that do not need to implement any special mobility protocol. The NEMO basic support protocol has been proposed in the IETF as a first solution to this problem, but this solution has severe performance limitations. This paper presents MIRON: Mobile IPv6 route optimization for NEMO, an approach to the problem of NEMO support that overcomes the limitations of the basic solution by combining two different modes of operation: a Proxy-MR and an address delegation with built-in routing mechanisms. This paper describes the design and rationale of the solution, with an experimental validation and performance evaluation based on an implementation.     

A Domain-Based Routing Protocol for SSM Source Mobility in Mobile IPv6 Networks

In Mobile IP, the signaling traffic overhead will be too high since the new Care-of-Address (CoA) of the mobile node (MN) is registered all the way with the home agent (HA) whenever the MN has moved into a new foreign network. To complement Mobile IP in better handling local movement, several IP micro protocols have been proposed. These protocols introduce a hierarchical mobility management scheme, which divides the mobility into micro mobility and macro mobility according to whether the host's movement is intra-domain or inter-domain. Thus, the requirements on performance and flexibility are achieved, especially for frequently moving hosts. This paper introduces a routing protocol for multicast source mobility on the basis of the hierarchical mobile management scheme, which provides a unified global architecture for both uni- and multicast routing in mobile networks. The implementation of multicast services adopts an improved SSM (Source Specific Multicast) model, which combines the advantages of the existing protocols in scalability and mobility transparency. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol has better performance than the existing routing protocols for SSM source mobility.     

Adaptive zone routing protocol for ad hoc network nodes with non‐uniform mobilities

In recent years, a variety of new routing protocols for mobile ad hoc wireless NETworks (MANETs) have been developed. Performance evaluation and comparison of many of these routing protocols have been performed using detailed simulation models. Zone routing protocol (ZRP) is one of these routing protocols, which is a hybrid routing protocol that proactively maintains routing information for a local neighbourhood (routing zone), while reactively acquiring routes to destinations beyond the routing zone. The studies on ZRP have assumed homogeneous scenarios where all mobile nodes have uniform mobility and are statistically identical, lacking the studies on heterogeneous scenarios where mobile nodes move with non‐uniform mobilities in the same network. In this paper, we study the performance of ZRP in such scenarios. We propose an efficient scheme for ZRP to adapt to the non‐uniform mobilities scenario and study its performance for different mobility scenarios, network loads and network sizes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Cross-Layer (Layer 2 + 3) Handoff Management Protocol for Next-Generation Wireless Systems

Next-generation wireless systems (NGWS) integrate different wireless networks, each of which is optimized for some specific services and coverage area to provide ubiquitous communications to the mobile users. It is an important and challenging issue to support seamless handoff management in this integrated architecture. The existing handoff management protocols are not sufficient to guarantee handoff support that is transparent to the applications in NGWS. In this work, a cross-layer (Layer 2 + 3) handoff management protocol, CHMP, is developed to support seamless intra and intersystem handoff management in NGWS. Cross-layer handoff management protocol uses mobile's speed and handoff signaling delay information to enhance the handoff performance of Mobile IP that is proposed to support mobility management in wireless IP networks. First, the handoff performance of Mobile IP is analyzed with respect to its sensitivity to the link layer (Layer 2) and network layer (Layer 3) parameters. Then, a cross-layer handoff management architecture is developed using the insights learnt from the analysis. Based on this architecture, the detailed design of CHMP is carried out. Finally, extensive simulation experiments are carried out to evaluate the performance of CHMP. The theoretical analysis and simulation results show that CHMP significantly enhances the performance of both intra and intersystem handoffs.     

A Novel SIP-Based Route Optimization for Network Mobility

With the provision of various wireless services, e.g., third-generation (3G) and wireless local area network (WLAN), more and more people request to access the Internet anywhere at anytime. For example, people want to check their e-mails on the bus or watch online news while traveling in the train. For this purpose, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed the concept of network mobility, i.e., a set of users move as a unit. We motivate the network mobility problem by considering the state-of-the-art scenario of the network mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol that is extended from the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). In order to avoid the same problems suffered by MIPv6, a new session initiation protocol (SIP)-based network mobility management scheme called SIP-NEMO is designed and proposed in this paper. The proposed SIP-NEMO not only copes with the movement of a mobile network but also achieves the route optimization between two SIP clients without too many signaling messages over wireless links, even if the mobile network is nested. In this paper, we also analytically compute and simulate the performance of SIP-NEMO with the NEMO basic support protocol proposed by the IETF.