SIP and mobile IP integration to support seamless mobility

In recent years, we have seen remarkable growth of the Internet and IP-based networks, which currently carry most of the end-user traffic. This traffic is being generated by a wide range of applications, often involving different media types such as audio and video. Another significant development recently has been in the area of mobile computing where wireless networks are frequently being used as extensions to wired Internet. As a result, there is increasing demand to run end-user applications seamlessly over both wired and wireless networks with minimal interruption. We present and discuss the design and implementation of two architectures each of which provides support for terminal and personal mobility. The first architecture combines the session initiation protocol (SIP) with mobile IP and the second architecture exploits a pure SIP-based solution to achieve both personal and terminal mobility. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these architectures using a voice over IP (VoIP) application. Based on our performance results, we found that a pure SIP-based solution yields better performance out of the two architectures implemented and tested.