Cellular universal IP for nested network mobility

In recent years, network mobility (NEMO) has been studied extensively due to its potential applications in military and public transportation. NEMO basic support protocol (NBSP), the current de facto NEMO standard based on mobile IPv6, can be readily deployed using the existing mobile IPv6 infrastructure. However, NBSP’s root in mobile IPv6, such as the need of care-of address (CoA) and tunneling, results in substantial performance overhead, generally known as route sub-optimality, in nested NEMO environments. This paper tackles this problem by proposing a scheme based on cellular universal IP (CUIP) to eliminate the need for CoA and tunneling in supporting nested network mobility. Using quantitative analysis, we show that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing nested NEMO schemes by multiple folds in terms of bandwidth overhead. We also show how IP fragmentation negatively impacts route optimality, and that the proposed scheme is inherently superior to the existing schemes in this regard. More importantly, while the scalability of the existing schemes generally deteriorates with the network size, the complexity of our proposed scheme is independent of the network size and thus is far more scalable. Our results show that the proposed scheme is particularly suitable for nested NEMO networks formed by mobile routers with random and ad hoc movement patterns.