A mechanism for host mobility management supporting application awareness

Many approaches exist today that address the issues that arise when a mobile node changes its point(s) of attachment to the Internet. Mobile IP takes care of host mobility at the IP layer; others at the transport layer (Mobile SCTP) or at the application layer (SIP with re-invite). In practice, most of these approaches rely on functionality residing on the mobile host that scans, detects and activates the networks available through one or more network interfaces.The mechanism proposed in this paper takes into account that multiple of these approaches may be applied at the same time. It provides the applications on the mobile host with information about the state of the lower-layer mobility management protocols (such as Mobile IP) as well as the state and characteristics of the available network resources. Applications may consecutively adapt their behavior depending on this mobility process information and thus accommodate to the changed network connectivity conditions, possibly in an application specific manner. In this paper, we present the architecture of our mobility management mechanism. We also describe the implementation of our prototype and the results of experiments with the mechanism, thereby addressing the complexities of an integrated application-aware mobility management system.