ARA: A Routing and Forwarding Scheme for Coordinated Wide Area Mobility

The wide availability of WiFi hot-spots provides mobile users with convenient access to the Internet. However, hot-spots cover only small areas and are often operated by a local authority. A user that roams between hot-spots effectively traverses different operators and access networks. Due to deployment complexity, IP mobility is usually not supported by the mobile node or the network. In this paper we propose an approach that enables access routers to provide seamless mobility support without any changes to the mobile node or other network entities. Our approach provides a simple, flexible, and deployable framework for mobility support and scales well with the number of involved access routers. By simulation and mathematical analysis, we show that even with lower deployment requirements and less support from the network, our approach performs well in terms of routing stretch, handover latency, and signaling overhead.