Signaling cost and performance of SIGMA: A seamless handover scheme for data networks

Mobile IP has been developed to handle mobility of Internet hosts at the network layer. Mobile IP (MIP), however, suffers from a number of drawbacks such as requirement of infrastructure change, high handover latency, high packet loss rate, and conflict with network security solutions. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the performance of SIGMA, a Seamless IP diversity-based Generalized Mobility Architecture. SIGMA utilizes multihoming to achieve seamless handover of mobile hosts, and is designed to solve many of the drawbacks of MIP, including requirement for changes in infrastructure. We first evaluate the signaling cost of SIGMA and compare with that of hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (an enhancement of Mobile IP) by analytical modeling, followed by comparison of handover performance of SIGMA and Mobile IPv6 enhancements. Criteria for performance evaluation include handover latency, packet loss, throughput, and network friendliness. Our results indicate that in most cases SIGMA has a lower signaling cost than Hierarchical Mobile IPv6. Moreover, for a typical network configuration, SIGMA has a higher handover performance over Mobile IP. Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: mobile handover; SIGMA; mobile IP; IP diversity; signaling cos