Tr94-020 Virtual Cell in Mobile Computer Communications

This paper describes a virtual cell concept for the transmission of IP datagrams in mobile computer communications. A virtual cell consists of a group of physical cells whose base stations are implemented by remote bridges and interconnected via high-speed data-gram packet-switched networks, supporting host mobility at the data link layer. Thus, as far as the IP layer is concerned, it appears as if the communication between two mobile hosts in diierent physical cells were taking place directly as in the same physical cell. It eliminates the necessity of IP-level protocols for mobility management which may interfere with the conventional IP protocol in a practical sense, and achieves a logically exible coverage area according to mobility and data traac patterns among physical cells. Virtual Cell Protocol (VCP) which consists of handover, address resolution, and data transfer modules is designed based on the distributed hierarchical location information of mobile hosts. To measure data which will be used as parameters to a performance model for the virtual cell, we implement VCP on a simulated environment .