Micromobility support for random access network topologies

The combination of mobile IP with frequent handovers results in high handoff latencies and control overhead in the core network. Micromobility protocols like cellular IP. Hawaii and MIPv4 regional registration were developed to avoid these problems, supporting local mobility within one IP domain. Hereby, tree access topologies were considered to evaluate the protocol performance A. Campbell et al., (2000) (2002) although meshed topologies are desired for reasons of robustness against link failures and load balancing L. Peters et al., (2003). The mentioned micromobility protocols do not use the extra links or result in a bad performance in terms of end-to-end delay. This paper proposes a new micromobility protocol for random access topologies. During handoff a router in the access network detects if it has the function of cross-over node. Hereby, control traffic is concentrated near the involved access routers, while optimal paths in the access network are achieved. The basic concept of the protocol is presented and the handoff performance is compared to other micromobility protocols.