A case for mobility support with temporary home agents

The Mobile IP standard for mobility management on the Internet enables transparent communication between mobile hosts (MH) and their correspondent hosts (CH). However, it suffers from triangular routing and prolonged handoff latency problems. In this paper, we propose to use a temporary home agent (TA) to address both problems. TA exploits the locality of user movement observed in recent studies for personal communication services (PCS) and wireless data networks. It dynamically selects a Mobile IP-based HA based on the location of the user. The TA allocates a temporary home address, THAddr to the MH, which the MH may use as its source address. The underlying objective is to shorten the distance between a MH and its home agent, which is a critical factor in reducing handoff latency and improving routing efficiency. Through both quantitative analysis and ns-2 simulation, we show that the TA approach outperforms Mobile IP and achieves comparable performance to route optimization (RO). While the TA approach focuses on improving the performance of traffic for sessions that are initiated by the MH, methods for optimizing traffic handling for sessions initiated by CH are discussed.