Mobility Support for Intermittently Connected Mobile Terminals

Terminal mobility support enables mobile terminals to switch from one wireless network to another wireless network without interrupting existing data connections. Existing protocols are designed for scenarios that the handover takes place between overlapping wireless networks. However, if a mobile terminal becomes disconnected for a while before it can join another network, existing protocols are unable to preserve user data and data connections will break. In this paper, we propose a mobility support protocol for intermittently connected mobile terminals (MOSIC) to address this issue. MOSIC makes use of delay tolerant network (DTN) architecture as the main data transport and provides transparent disruption tolerant mobility support for mobile terminals. Through mathematically analysis, the traffic overhead of the proposed protocol is shown to be lower than existing mobile IPv4.