Design, implementation and experimental evaluation of an end-to-end vertical handover scheme on NCTUns simulator

摘要

This paper presents the simulation study of "Host based autonomous Mobile Address Translation" using NCTUns simulator. It is a network layer, end-to-end vertical handover solution, based upon modification of "Mobile IP with address Translation". Vertical handover approaches generally require new network elements, a new layer in TCP/IP stack, or fixing a protocol at a particular layer. To enhance handover experience, recent approaches focus on reducing signalling, localizing the registration, creating hierarchies, using proxy, preparing handover in advance, predicting target network, or exploiting multicasting and path extension techniques. These approaches, however, demand change in the network infrastructure to support mobility and limit the scope of mobility. Despite end-to-end signalling, the Host based autonomous Mobile Address Translation scheme ensures minimum service disruption and distinctly allows global mobility of the mobile node without requiring any modification in the network. We have simulated the mobility of a multi-interface mobile node in a heterogeneous network environment composed of WiFi (IEEE802.11a, IEEE802.11b) and WiMAX (IEEE802.16e) access networks. Performance of the scheme is evaluated taking into account wide range of end-to-end delays between mobile node and the correspondent node, various speeds of the mobile node and different packet loss rates of the network. Based on our detailed simulation study, it has been observed that this scheme offers reduced service disruption time, packet loss and packet latency. The service disruption time is found to be significantly low (typically in the range of 10 ms) compared to that of Mobile IP (which is in the order of 100 ms); this makes this new scheme perfectly suitable for real time applications. Low service disruption time consequently reduces the packet loss by manyfold and the packet latency remains unaffected during and after handover due to translation of address at the source. The results suggest that this protocol is a viable vertical handover solution due to its simplicity, scalability, low overhead and ready deployability.