Investigations into micromobility issues in IP networks

Abstract

Mobile IP, the current standard for IP Mobility, was designed for environments where mobility is an exception not a norm. With the advances in technology, availability of multinodal devices, capable of connecting to multiple networks simultaneously, and the WLAN revolution, there is a growing need to support seamless mobility for wireless Internet access. Micromobility protocols address the important issue of seamless handoff in mobile Internet access environments and interwork with Mobile IP to provide a comprehensive mobility management solution.Several micromobility mechanisms have been proposed over the past decade, that essentially employ a proxy based approach to hide user mobility from global peers. The objective of this thesis is to better understand the issues raised by such designs and develop solutions and protocols that require minimal changes to the IP stack and existing infrastructure.In this thesis, two protocols have been developed, one each for IPv4 and IPv6 networks. While the IPv6 based approach, called Auto-update Micromobility takes an end-to-end approach to host mobility, the IPv4 approach, called Reverse ICMP Redirect (RIR), presents a simple and highly scalable solution for location management.