An Approach for Mobility Modeling - Towards an Efficient Mobility Management Support in Future Wireless Networks

Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) is deployed in the Internet backbone to support service differentiation and traffic engineering. In recent years, there has been an interest to extend the MPLS capability to the wireless access networks for mobility management support. In this paper, we present an analytical approach to study the handoff performance of a wireless system with a new micro-mobility support called micro mobile MPLS. Our scheme includes two protocol variants. In the first variant called FH-micro mobile MPLS, we consider the fast handoff mechanism, which anticipates the LSP procedure setup with an adjacent neighbor subnet that an mobile node (MN) is likely to visit. This mechanism is proposed to reduce service disruption by using the link-layer (L2) functionalities. In the second variant called FC-micro mobile MPLS, the forwarding chain concept, which is a set of forwarding path, is provided to track efficiently the host mobility within a domain. This concept can significantly reduce the resource reservation cost, the registration updates cost and provide low handoff latency. Analytical models, which capture the mobility behavior of an MN, are developed for cost analysis. Numerical and simulation results are given to justify the benefits of our proposed mechanisms