Terminal-Assisted Network Mobility Management

In network mobility support for wireless ad hoc networks, mobile routers (MRs) are connected to access router (AR) by ad hoc routing. Mobile network nodes (MNNs) connect to an MR to communicate to distant correspondent nodes (CNs). Previous works on network mobility in mobile IPv6 involve packet redirection through a home agent; this redirection is costly in both bandwidth and delay. In this paper, we propose a terminal-assisted network mobility management scheme, which requires neither permanent node's IP address nor additional network servers/infrastructure support. With this scheme, IP packets redirection is not necessary; IP packets are routed directly between MNNs and CNs. Our scheme is implemented in three components: an IP-to-IP address mapping scheme on the MNN, an IPv6 header extension on each IP packet, and an IP address redirection scheme on the MRs. An MNN is located by a uniform resource identifier (URI) provided by a directory service that maps URI to IP address. Through numerical analysis, we show that our mobility management scheme exhibits better efficiency compared with that of mobile IPv6.