An End-to-End Network Architecture for Supporting Mobility in Wide Area Wireless Networks

摘要

This paper presents a network architecture with a dual interface IP handoff technique that allows smooth node mobility without using any intermediate proxy. The proposed architecture is suitable for low bit-rate time sensitive real time applications, where payload tends to be short and packet header overhead is particularly significant. Connections are established as per permanent addresses of the nodes but are carried on by the IP layer according to the temporary addresses by address translation within the end hosts. The mapping information is maintained by database servers, which can be placed in the Internet in a distributed manner. We describe the architecture and show its mobile capabilities by prototype implementation and performance evaluation. Furthermore a dual-interface hand-off suitable to the proposed architecture is also introduced. Preliminary results show that the proposed architecture has significantly low overheads. It is compatible with the existing infrastructure and works fine in both IPv4 and IPv6 environments. Analysis also shows that with dual-interface hand-off it is possible to achieve seamless handoff without any packet loss by exploiting overlapping coverage area and speed of the mobile node. Hand-off latency is reduced significantly as compare to MIPv6. We believe that with more powerful network interface card drivers our concept of dual interface handoff can be realized.