PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF IP MICROMOBILITY PROTOCOLS

Abstract

The current standard for supporting mobility of hosts is Mobile IF. This includes macro and micro-mobility both. But due to the high roundtrip delay of the Internet and due to Mobile IP's control overhead, Mobile IP causes connections of a mobile node to be interrupted for each change of its attachment point to the Internet. For high handoff rates this situation worsens. Resulting from this weakness some micromobility approaches have been proposed within the IETF, which support mobility in a well defined area, e.g. in an access network, and-interact with Mobile IP in a hierarchical way. The aim of these protocols is fast and seamless mobility and reduced signaling to conserve power. These are called IP Micromobility protocols because they inter-work with existing IP protocols while providing micromobility support. Two key micromobility protocols gaining wide recognition currently are Cellular IP and I-Iandoff Aware Wireless Access Internet Infrastructure(HAWAII). Both have more than one handoff schemes. Some try to minimize losses using a complex approach while others use simple approach to complete the handoff while allowing packet loss. This dissertation work aims at comparing the performance of different handoff schemes of Cellular IP and HAWAII so as to better understand the implementation issues and tradeoff's involved. A generalized simulation framework was developed in C++ on which five handoff schemes were implemented and the simulation results for handoff performance thus obtained are presented and discussed. The simulation implementation is also discussed so as to give an idea of how to implement any further protocol on it. More than one topology with different crossover distances were considered so as to obtain more comprehensive results. The results substantiate the fact that the tradeoff is mainly between network overhead and packet loss. They also show that Cellular IP and HAWAII perform equally well since the operational principles that govern them are largely similar.