SHIP: Cross-layer mobility management scheme based on Session Initiation Protocol and Host Identity Protocol

In the all-IP wireless networks, mobility management is a crucial issue, and it can be operated at different layers in the traditional Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) stack. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an application layer protocol used for the signaling and the mobility management without any modifications of the lower layer protocols, especially in the voice over IP environment. However, since it always gets the lowest priority in the networking model, it will produce the large handoff latency, the packet loss, and the handoff blocking probability. To provide an efficient mobility management, SIP can be combined with other protocols. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer mobility management scheme based on SIP and the Host Identity Protocol (HIP) which is a new protocol designed to provide secure and continuous communications between two nodes by separating the identifier and the locator roles of the traditional IP address. In the proposed scheme, the mobile node and the correspondent node use their host identity tags to establish the session connections, and the mobile nodes uses the HIP location update scheme instead of the SIP location update scheme to update its IP address when it moves to a new subnet. We discuss the proposed scheme’s architecture and the major mobility procedures, including the session setup, the handoff and the location update in this paper. We also develop an analytical model to study the handoff performance of the proposed scheme, the typical SIP, and the hybrid SIP/Mobile IP, respectively. The analytical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the typical SIP and the hybrid SIP/Mobile IP in terms of the handoff latency, the packet loss, and the handoff blocking probability.