Hierarchical Location Management for Transport Layer Mobility

IP mobility can be handled at different layers of the protocol stack. Mobile IP has been developed to handle mobility of Internet hosts at the network layer. As an alternative solution, a number of transport layer mobility protocols have been proposed, for example, MSOCKS and TCP connection migration solution in the context of TCP, and M-SCTP and mobile SCTP in the context of SCTP. More recently, a new protocol called Seamless IP diversity based Generalized Mobility Architecture (SIGMA) was proposed to support low latency, low packet loss IP mobility. The location management schemes used in these transport layer solutions are not suitable for frequent mobile handovers due to user’s high mobility. In this paper, we propose HiSIGMA, a hierarchical location management scheme for transport layer mobility schemes. We develop an analytical model to evaluate HiSIGMA using signaling cost as the performance measure, followed by comparison of the signalling cost of HiSIGMA and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (an enhancement of Mobile IP). Numerical results have shown that signaling cost of HiSIGMA is lower than that of HMIPv6.