Multilayered Mobility Management for Survivable Network

A variety of mobility management scheme have been developed for commercial networks ranging from Mobile IP (network layer support), to the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) based on application layer components such as DNS and SMTP, and Micro-Mobility approaches like Cellular IP, HAWAII. There are significant challenges, however, with regard to the robustness, management overhead requirements and latency in each of these approaches, especially in military environments where the network is very dynamic. It is desirable to provide continuous connectivity between the nodes for real-time and non-real-time traffic. We propose to dramatically improve mobility management of the terrestrial networks to provide support for dynamic military networks by developing an integrated mobility management approach that both meets the needs of end-user applications and deals with the harsh networking environment. This approach is based on the concept of dynamic servers, provided on the airborne nodes, that enhance the mobility of nodes on the ground. Unlike in the fixed Internet, where such servers are always present, our approach requires the development of robust mechanisms that allow the servers to advertise their existence to terrestrial nodes and to synchronize with each other and with their terrestrial peers to ensure coherency. Proposed approach provides a multi-layered mobility management solution. It provides personal and terminal mobility for real-time traffic such as voice-over-IP or video streaming through deployment of dynamic SIP and DNS servers in a distributed manner. It provides network layer support through the use of Mobile IP with Location Registers (MIP-LR) for non-real-time applications. Local mobility management is achieved through the use of micro-mobility management protocol (MMP) that reduces the need to update the SIP, DNS and MIP-LR servers when end nodes move locally within a domain.