A Virtual MAC Address Scheme for Mobile Ethernet

Heterogeneous wireless access is being integrated into IP networks to support future wireless systems. The enhanced IP technologies being developed must address both handover issues related to mobility management and security issues related to wireless access. We previously proposed a network architecture, Mobile Ethernet, based on wide area Ethernet technologies, that reduces overhead involving handover by managing mobility in the IEEE802 MAC layer. We also proposed a virtual MAC address scheme that introduces a host identifier into layer 2 to accommodate heterogeneous wireless access, manage handover between wireless accesses, provide scalability, and ensure security. In this paper, we design the virtual MAC address scheme for Mobile Ethernet and describe the sequence diagrams of the scheme. We also clarify the effect of our proposed scheme from the viewpoint of scalability by comparing the simulated signaling traffic load at handover with that using FMIPv6. Yoshia Saito received his B.E. and M.E. degrees from Shizuoka University, Shizuoka, Japan, in 2002 and 2003 respectively. He is currently a student in Ph.D. course in the university. From January 2004, he is also working as a visiting researcher at National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Yokosuka, Japan. His research interests include mobile computing and next generation wireless systems. Masahiro Kuroda received the M.E. degree in systems science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, in 1980, the M.S. degree in computer science from University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, in 1989, and received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Shizuoka University, Japan, in 2000. He joined Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Kamakura, Japan in 1980. Since then, he was engaged in OS/network developments, mobile network computing R&D, and cellular Java standardizations. He is currently working as a group leader at National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Yokosuka, Japan. His current research interests includes wireless network, wireless security, mobile systems, ubiquitous systems, and next generation wireless systems architecture. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society. Tadanori Mizuno received the B.E. degree in industrial engineering from the Nagoya Institute of Technology in 1968 and received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Kyushu University, Japan, in 1987. In 1968, he joined Mitsubishi Electric Corp. Since 1993, he is a Professor of Faculty of Engineering, Shizuoka University, Japan. He moved to the Faculty of Information, Shizuoka University in 1995. His research interests include mobile computing, distributed computing, computer networks, broadcast communication and computing, and protocol engineering. He is a member of Information Processing Society of Japan, the institute of electronics, information and Communication Engineers, the IEEE Computer Society and ACM.