Joint support of QoS and mobility in a stateless IP environment

Providing QoS support over mobile IP networks is a non-trivial task. An important aspect of this issue is that IP mobility does not require intermediate routers to handle connection states, while connection state management is assumed in classical proposals for QoS support (e.g. RSVP), when support of per-flow admission control is aimed at. Such differences in the basic assumptions of QoS and mobility proposals have to be overcome, to provide a comprehensive and homogeneous solution. This paper builds on recent studies, which have proven that per flow admission control is indeed possible over stateless IP frameworks. In particular, the paper shows that a stateless, distributed admission control called GRIP (Gauge and Gate Reservation with Independent Probing) can be applied to Mobile IP scenarios without any major modification in the mobility management mechanism. GRIP relies the decision to admit a new flow upon the successful and timely delivery of IP probe packets independently generated by the end points. When applied within a mobile context, GRIP leaves each mobile node in charge of dynamically selecting the appropriate end point peer during handover. This feature allows limiting the scope of handover-driven admission control procedures to the network part where the path has changed. This is conformant with the spirit of local handover in micromobility architectures. Our proposal is then a first effort towards a joint support of QoS and mobility over a stateless IP domain