PERFORMANCE STUDY OF IP MICROMOBILITY PROTOCOLS THROUGH SIMULATION

Abstract

Mobile IP is the current standard for supporting mobility in IP networks. However, Mobile IP is not designed to support fast handoff and seamless mobility in handoff intensive environments. Several IP micromobility protocols have been proposed to enhance the performance of Mobile IP in an environment with frequent handoffs. Their aim is to handle local movement of mobile hosts within a domain without interaction with the Mobile IP enabled Internet. This has the benefit of reducing delay and packet loss during handoff and eliminating registration between mobile hosts and possibly distant Home Agents, which further reduces the signaling load experienced by the network in support of mobility. Cellular IP, HAWAII and HMIP are some of the popular IP micromobility protocols. In this dissertation, five different handoff schemes of HAWAII and HMIP protocols are compared on two different handoff scenarios (proactive and reactive) based on a simulation study. A generalized simulation framework has been developed to implement the protocols and their performance has been studied. The performance parameters used are Packet Loss, Packet Duplication and Handoff Delay. Two different topologies (Tree and Mesh) have been used to study the topological behavior of the schemes. The simulation software is developed