Mobile IP Fast Authentication Protocol

Abstract: Latency during handoffs affects the service quality of real-time applications, therefore the developing of mobility management protocols is a major challenge in the wireless network. In this paper we propose a fast and smooth handoff scheme called MIFA (Mobile IP Fast Authentication protocol), which reduces the latency of re-authentication and re-registration when changing the point of attachment to the Internet. Using MIFA, some functions previously implemented by the Home Agent (HA) are additional supported by the Foreign Agent (FA). Thus, the Mobile Node (MN) can quickly resume the transmission in up- and downlink after the handoff. The basic idea to support fast handoff is to employ local authentication with the new FA and to inform the old FA about the new binding. The major point of MIFA is that the MN can authenticates itself with the FA and with the HA, however this happens in the FA. We have designed the SDL specification, the corresponding MSCs and a simple analytical performance model of the MIFA protocol. Our performance study shows that the handoff latency of MIFA is independent of the distance between the current FA and the HA. Thus, MIFA highly reduces the handoff latency for most cases. MIFA clearly outperforms Mobile IP (MIP) with respect to the handoff latency and the number of packets dropped due to handoffs. In addition, MIFA performs similar to Hierarchical MIP (HMIP) when the MN moves within a domain consisting of two hierarchy levels only and outperforms HMIP otherwise. Different from HMIP, MIFA does not require additional network elements as HMIP does. Thus, MIFA conforms to the standard MIP approach and the IP philosophy to confine host-specific processing to the end systems as much as possible. 1