Mobility management for mobile computing over wide-area wireless networks

• Main Author: Ng, Kin Weng
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9347

The growth of global networking together with the development of wide-area wireless networks and portable terminals have made host mobility support in the computing environment an important issue. To enable seamless roaming and efficient delivery of datagrams to mobile hosts, an effective means of distributing the location information of mobile hosts is needed so as to allow a computer to maintain normal communication with any nodes on the Internet regardless of its point-of-attachment. Mobile IP, designed within the IETF is the current standard mobility management protocol for mobile computing. One of the concerns raised with Mobile IP is the large amount of signaling traffic generated for highly mobile computers. This thesis addresses this issue by proposing a scheme developed over Mobile IP with several extensions and modifications. The proposed scheme integrates location tracking with routing operation by utilizing the client-server interaction inherent in most application to provide the correspondent host with the mobile host's location. To evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme, simulations of typical Internet application sessions involving a mobile host were carried out to examine the amount of control traffic generated and the costs associated with routing packets to the mobile host. Results obtained show a substantial reduction in the mobility management overhead for the proposed scheme compared to Mobile IP, without adversely affecting the routing efficiency.