Fast and Effective Wireless Handoff Scheme using Forwarding Pointers and Hierarchical Foreign Agents

Mobile IP, an extension of the standard IP protocol is used to keep track of location information and make the data available to the mobile device anytime, anywhere. With increasing technological developments in digital wireless transmission and location tracking devices, cell sizes are becoming smaller and smaller, increasing the available bandwidth per cell. Thus, the handoff latency between two cells is becoming an important aspect to minimize in order to maintain uniform connectivity. In standard Mobile IP, when the mobile host is far away from its home agent, the registration time delay is high. Hence, many data packets could get lost during the handoff. We propose a mobility management scheme that combines hierarchical mobility management with the forwarding pointer scheme. In this scheme, when a mobile host moves within a sub-net or within a domain, the registration requests are handled locally and not transmitted to the home agent. When a mobile host moves from one domain to another, forwarding pointers between the two domains are used to keep track of the location of the mobile host. This reduces handoff latency and location management cost. We present simulation results to validate our claim. I