Academic literature on the topic 'End-to-End dynamics of Mobile IP Networks'

Due to terminal mobility and change of service area, efficient IP mobility support is an important aspect in UMTS networks in order to provide mobile users negligible packet loss rate and low handover latency, and thus some level of guaranteed quality-ofservice (QoS) to support real-time applications. 3G/UMTS has been specified and implemented as an end-to-end mobile communications system. The underlying WCDMA access systems manage radio access handover (layer 1) and provide linklayer mobility (layer 2) in terms of connection setup and resource management. For the UMTS nodes to have seamless connectivity with the Internet, the UMTS core networks need to be able to support continuous and no network service session handover (layer 3 and above). A long IP handover latency results in high packet loss rate and severely degrades its end-to-end transport level performance. Network-layer handover latency has therefore been regarded as one of the fundamental limitations in IP-based UMTS networks. Therefore, it is crucial to provide efficient network-layer mobility management in UMTS/WCDMA networks for seamless end-to-end TCP connection with the global Internet. Mobility of UMTS nodes necessitates extra functionalities such as user location tracking, address registration and handover related mechanisms. The challenge to provide seamless mobility in UMTS requires localised location management and efficient IP handover management. Mobile IPv6 protocol offers a better mobility support as the extended IPv6 features with mobility mechanism are integrated to the mobile nodes. To mitigate the effect of lengthy IP handover latency, two well-known handover reducing mechanisms based on Mobile IPv6 support have been proposed in the literature. They are designed with hierarchical network management and address pre-configuration mechanism. Hierarchical management aims to reduce the network registration time, and fast-handover attempts to minimise the address resolution delay. S-MIP (Seamless Mobile IP) integrates the key benefits of the above IP mobility mechanisms coupled with local retransmission scheme to achieve packet lossless and extremely low handover latency, operating in WLAN environments. In this thesis, we explore the possible Mobile IP solutions and various IP handover optimisation schemes in IPv6 to provide seamless mobility in UMTS with the global Internet. It aims at developing an optimised handover scheme that encompasses the packet lossless and extremely low handover latency scheme in S-MIP, and applying it into the UMTS/WCDMA packet data domain. Therefore, the hybrid UMTS-SMIP architecture is able to meet the requirements of delay sensitive real-time applications requiring strict delay bound, packet lossless and low handover latency performance for end-to-end TCP connection during a UMTS IP-based handover. The overall seamless handover architecture in UMTS facilitates integrated, scalable and flexible global IP handover solution enabling new services, assuring service quality and meeting the user???s expectations in future all-IP UMTS deployment. The viability of the seamless mobility scheme in UMTS is reflected through and validated in our design model, network protocol implementation, and service architecture. We illustrate the performance gained in QoS parameters, as a result of converged UMTS-SMIP framework compared to other Mobile IPv6 variants. The simulation results show such a viable and promising seamless handover scheme in UMTS on IP handover latency reduction on its end-to-end TCP connection.