Distributed mobile tracking: a novel location management scheme for routing improvement in cellular IP networks

In this paper, a novel location management scheme, distributed mobile tracking (DMT), is proposed for routing improvement in Cellular IP networks. A mobile-tracking tree (MT-Tree) for each active mobile host is established by tracking the movement of the host in DMT. Two mechanisms, pruning process and growing process, are also proposed to improve DMT. Packet transmissions can follow the route on the MT-Tree instead of using the gateway route. Simulation results have shown that DMT has the advantages of shorter routing paths as well as load balance for wired links over the original gateway-based location management scheme. Moreover, three multicast protocols for Cellular IP are proposed: GBMP, GBMP-RO, and MTMP. In GBMP, the gateway is responsible for group management as well as multicast transmission. Multicast packets received by the base station are first forwarded to the gateway. The gateway then forwards the packets to each member of the group by multiple unicasting. GBMP-RO, a modified version of GBMP, adopts the idea of source routing for multicast transmissions. MTMP is mainly based on the MT-Tree routing scheme. However, if not all group members can be covered by MT-Tree routing, MTMP will instead adopt GBMP-RO for multicast transmission. Simulation results demonstrate that MTMP has the advantages over GBMP and GBMPRO in terms of load balance in the Cellular IP network. 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.