Seamless Mobility Mechanisms for Micro Mobile MPLS

Abstract

Efficient mobility management is one of the most important challenges in mobile networks. Since roaming between wireless cells can cause long handoff latency and high packet loss, it can result in poor quality of services for delay-sensitive applications and for applications requiring reliable transmission. In this paper, we propose a new seamless micro-mobility management framework for Micro Mobile MPLS (called MiM-MPLS) to overcome the packet loss problem while maintaining low handoff latency. In addition, we propose a combination of MiM-MPLS and the existing MFC-Micro Mobile MPLS [3],[4] (called MiM-MFC-MPLS) to further enhance the handoff performance. MiM-MPLS and MiM-MFC-MPLS provide efficient handoff mechanisms through the use of pre-established Label Switched Paths (LSPs), the L2 trigger, and local registration. The handoff mechanisms for (L2 and L3) intra handoffs and for an inter handoff in these frameworks are described in detail. The performance is analyzed in terms of the signaling cost of registration updates, handoff latency, packet loss, buffer size requirement, and delay jitter. Compared to existing handoff frameworks, the results show that the proposed MiM-MPLS and MiM-MFC-MPLS can provide no packet loss while maintaining low signaling cost of registration updates, handoff latency, and delay jitter at the cost of some buffer space. In particular, MiM-MFC-MPLS has the best handoff performance (i.e., the lowest signaling cost of registration updates, handoff latency, and delay jitter) among all the frameworks that we considered at the cost of some buffer space.