Requirements for localised IP mobility management

Standard IP mobility management (IP-MM) commonly known as Mobile IP, presents a set of technical challenges in performance and scalability, as the mobile host (MN) varies the handoff rate, due to its mobility pattern, between successive wireless points of attachment; these manifest themselves primarily as increased signaling between the MN and its peers. In addition, they encompass sources of latency external to the mobility protocol; a significant component of this latency is induced by signaling round trip time between the communicating entities while in transit. Recently, Mobile IP has been extended by certain micro-mobility protocol mechanisms, aiming to alleviate the above performance limitations; they are identified as hierarchical/regional or more generically localised IP mobility management. This paper presents an investigation on requirements for IP localised mobility management (IP-LMM). Based on generic principles derived from the effect of localising mobility control signaling it explores the requirement space essential for robust micro-mobility protocol extensions to base IP mobility models.