Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Science Information Technology and Electrical Engineering - Devices and Systems, Materials and Technologies for the Future

It is nowadays well known that All-IP networks will be the future B3G networks. However, in order to make these networks as good as 2 or 3G networks with respect to the performance, many challenges have to be faced. One of the main challenges is the developing of suitable mobility solutions to support seamless and fast movement in the network. Mobile IP (MIP) presents the standard mobility management protocol. However, MIP is not adequate for delay sensitive applications. Therefore, micro mobility management solutions are introduced to process the movements locally. Micro mobility divides the space the MN moves inside into domains. The MN performs intra-domain handoff when moving inside the domain and inter-domain handoff when moving between different administrative domains. Standard Frameworks use a micro mobility solution to support intra-domain mobility and MIP to support inter-domain handoffs. Mobile IP Fast Authentication protocol (MIFA) is proposed to avoid the problems of MIP and to match the requirements of real-time applications. Our performance studies have shown that MIFA clearly outperforms MIP with respect to the handoff latency and the expected number of the dropped packets. Thus, it is useful to integrate MIFA with other micro mobility protocols to support fast intraand inter-domain mobility. In this paper we propose a new mobility management framework. This framework integrates Hierarchical Mobile IP (HMIP) as a micro mobility management protocol with MIFA instead of MIP as a macro mobility management protocol. Our proposal should clearly outperform the standard framework with respect to the handoff latency and the expected number of dropped packets during inter-domain handoffs. Inter-domain mobility is accelerated to be approximately the same as intra-domain mobility. The full specification of this framework is presented in this paper.