Mobility and Layer 2 Tunnels

An increase in the size and requirements of a mobile workforce is driving the development of better mobility oriented services in terms of both content and connectivity. Even though traditional {Mobile IP} has been the primary means of providing mobility to nodes roaming between foreign networks, its extension to support the mobility of entire networks leads to an increase in the encapsulation overheads. In addition, the increasing perception within the mobile workforce as to the inadequacies of Layer 3 connectivity provided by traditional Mobile IP opens up the possibility of considering the mobility problem from a Layer 2 perspective.This paper presents a Layer 2 extension to the traditional implementation of Mobile IP by replacing the IP-IP tunnels of Mobile IP with L2TPv3 based Layer 2 tunnels. Simulations results obtained from performance evaluation indicate comparable performance of the proposed Layer 2 mobility solution with respect to traditional {Mobile IP} in terms of real-time and best-effort traffic streams. The proposed Layer 2 mobility solution increases the possible services available to mobile nodes with minimal performance degradation.