IDMP: An intradomain mobility management protocol for next-generation wireless networks

This article describes a lightweight intradomain mobility management protocol (IDMP) for managing mobility within a domain, commonly known as micromobility management, for next-generation wireless networks. IDMP is modular and simple because it leverages existing protocols, such as Mobile IP or SIP as global mobility management, for locating roaming nodes. Unlike other proposed intradomain mobility management schemes, IDMP uses two dynamically autoconfigured care-of addresses for routing the packets destined to mobile nodes. The global care-of address is relatively stable and identifies the mobile node's attachment to the current domain, while the local care-of address changes every time the mobile changes subnets and identifies the mobile's attachment to the subnet level granularity. After describing the lightweight base protocol, we discuss possible enhancements to reduce the latency of intradomain updates during handoffs, which are critical for real-time applications both for wide area cellular networks and enterprise wireless LANs. We also discuss mechanisms to incorporate paging support in IDMP and hence reduce the mobility-related signaling load on a mobile node. Detailed implementation and performance results from experiments on our testbed are also presented.