Route Optimization Mechanisms for Internet Applications in Mobile Networks: A Survey

The use of mobile networks is rapidly increasing day by day. There are two aspects in mobile networks such as host mobility and network mobility. The protocols used for host mobility takes care of only single node to be connected with the internet. But, the protocols used for network mobility takes care of whole network to be connected with the internet using mobile router. The need for NEtwork MObility (NEMO) support is inevitable in mobile platforms such as car, bus, train, air-plane, etc. The Mobile Internet Protocol version 6 (MIPv6) and NEMO Basic Support Protocol (BSP) is used to support host mobility and network mobility, respectively. The NEMO BSP introduces several advantages, such as reduced signaling, increased manageability, reduced power consumption and conservation of bandwidth when compared to MIPv6 to be used in the mobile platforms. The NEMO BSP also suffers from a number of limitations, like inefficient route and increased handoff latency. The recent researches on NEMO have proposed several Route Optimization (RO) schemes that solves inefficient route. Though the proposed RO mechanisms solve inefficient route, it also has limitations such as signaling overflow, complexity and processing overload, delay during handoff, security breach, etc. The objectives of this survey are to identify, classify RO mechanisms and to select suitable RO mechanisms to enhance Quality of Service (QoS) in different kinds of internet applications.