A SIP-Based Mobility Management Architecture Supporting TCP with Handoff Optimization

Keeping a session connected as a mobile host traverses across networks is the responsibility of a handoff management protocol. An effective protocol should support various transport protocols, require minimum changes, and manage handoff with acceptable delay and signaling cost. In this paper, a handoff management architecture that utilizes application layer gateway (ALG) and network address translation (NAT) mechanisms based on the session initiation protocol (SIP) is proposed. In addition to supporting mobility for the TCP session, the proposed architecture also optimizes real-time handoff delay by reducing delays caused by layer independency and duplication address detection (DAD) procedure and head of train delay caused by sequential execution of handoff procedures at different layers with few changes to the existing protocols and infrastructure.