Impact of the access network topology on the handoff performance

Micromobility protocols such as Cellular IP, Hawaii and Hierarchical Mobile IP are developed to solve problems of high handoff latency and control overhead, which occur when Mobile IP is used in combination with frequent handoffs. Up to now, tree access network topologies are considered to evaluate the protocol performance. However, for reasons of robustness against link failures and load balancing, extra uplinks and mesh links in the topology are desired. This article makes a classification of several topology types and gives a model that points out to which extent the topology influences the protocol performance in terms of handoff latency and handoff packet loss. Simulations confirm the results calculated by the model. Performance metrics such as load balancing, end-to-end delay and robustness against link failures are also evaluated. The study points to several shortcomings of the existing micromobility protocols for different topology types. Several aspects of the studied handoff schemes, their advantages and drawbacks are identified.