Mobility Management Using P2P Techniques in Wireless Networks

Mobility management is an important task in wireless networks. The Mobile IP protocol provides a basic solution to mobility management in future all-IP wireless network environments. However, Mobile IP suffers from several problems such as triangular routing, long distant and frequent registration update. In this paper, we propose to use the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network technology to improve Mobile IP. We organize home agents into P2P networks, and take addressing binding data as shard data. A user’s address binding will be hashed into the P2P network and can be queried using P2P lookup mechanisms. We can use a key value (e.g., email or IP address, telephone number) in the P2P lookup, to uniquely locate a user’s address binding. The potential characteristics of load balancing and fault tolerance in a P2P network make our approach more scalable and robust than the standard Mobile IP. To reduce the registration update cost, we chose a dynamic home agent for each mobile user that is close to the user’s location. We study the performance of our proposed approach both qualitatively and quantitatively.