Handover analysis in mobile networks

Abstract

Mobile networking technology supports the requirements of today’s new class of Internet users as they roam about with sophisticated mobile computers and digital wireless data communication devices. Integrating wireless networks into the global Internet poses a new challenge. The main reason is that the TCP/IP based Internet technologies were designed for wired networks with mostly fixed hosts. Host mobility requires change in the routing protocol so that packets for a moving host can be delivered to their correct destination. Mobile IP allows a mobile node to send and receive packets with its home IP address, regardless of the IP address of its current point of attachment in the Internet. First, four routing approaches, mobile IP, route optimization, hierarchical foreign agent management, and anchor chain schemes are discussed with regard to the handovers. A pointer forwarding approach with distributed binding caches is proposed for location tracking and multi-tunneling. Pointers are used for location tracking in new calls and for multi-tunneling in handover calls. For effective management of the pointers, the lifetime of pointers is considered. Also, the multi-tunneling threshold is adopted to prevent the offered load to the correspondent node due to the successive handovers. The route reestablishment time during handover is analyzed in each routing scheme and compared with four scenarios. Simulation is performed to obtain appropriate lifetime of the pointers and the multi-tunneling threshold. Experimental result shows that the proposed pointer forwarding outperforms other mobile IP routing schemes. The handover disruption time is reduced to 7 ~ 44 % in the proposed pointer forwarding scheme with robustness to different scenarios. Next, the Fast Handover algorithm is proposed in the Wireless LAN. Mobile IP operations broadly involve movement detection, IP address configuration, and location update. These operations cause the latency which prevents supporting ...