Architecture and performance of SIGMA: a seamless mobility architecture for data networks

The Internet Engineering Task Force has developed Mobile IP to handle the mobility of Internet hosts at the network layer. Mobile IP, however, suffers from a number of drawbacks such as high handover latency, packet loss, and conflict with network security solutions. We describe and evaluate the performance of SIGMA (seamless IP diversity based generalized mobility architecture). SIGMA utilizes IP diversity to achieve the seamless handover of a mobile host, and is designed to solve many of the drawbacks of Mobile IP. Various aspects of the performance of SIGMA and Mobile IPv6 enhancements have been compared. Criteria for performance evaluation include handover latency, packet loss, throughput, and network friendliness.