Seamless Mobile Ip Handoff in All-ip Wireless Networks

Mobile wireless networks, including IEEE 802.16e wireless metropolitan area networks, are evolving towards all-IP, and accordingly they face the fundamental overhead problem for mobility management. To reduce the handoff overhead of mobile IP, we design a subnet-based network, instead of a pure all-IP network, that primarily uses layer 2 handoff within a subnet. In such a network, we deploy some dual-linked access points (APs) that are connected to their two neighboring access routers (ARs). Each AR is considered to cover the area over hundreds of APs. Using additional link connections at the APs that are located between two AR regions, our proposed method can smoothly decouple layer 2 and 3 handoff operations. During the layer 3 handoff, either the old or corresponding new AR forwards packets destined for the mobile user through the same AP, so the mobile user experiences low latency and low packet loss. Through simple analysis, we compare our proposed scheme with the conventional approach in terms of latency.