A Virtual MAC Address Scheme for Mobile Ethernet

Heterogeneous wireless access is being integrated into IP networks to support future wireless systems. The enhanced IP technologies being developed must address both handover issues related to mobility management and security issues related to wireless access. We previously proposed a network architecture, Mobile Ethernet, based on wide area Ethernet technologies, that reduces overhead involving handover by managing mobility in the IEEE802 MAC layer. We also proposed a virtual MAC address scheme that introduces a host identifier into layer 2 to accommodate heterogeneous wireless access, manage handover between wireless accesses, provide scalability, and ensure security. In this paper, we design the virtual MAC address scheme for Mobile Ethernet and describe the sequence diagrams of the scheme. We also clarify the effect of our proposed scheme from the viewpoint of scalability by comparing the simulated signaling traffic load at handover with that using FMIPv6.