MOBILITY MANAGEMENT FOR IP-BASED WIRELESS NETWORKS

INTRODUCTION The growth of Internet applications and the availability of laptop and palmtop computers have rapidly increased the demand of mobility support, that was typical of classical cellular telephony. In this scenario, to achieve the integration of every system under the IP model, it is necessary to develop efficient protocols and architectures in order to ensure total coverage for wireless services with strict requirements of timing and Quality of Service. Since IP was originally designed for fixed networks, typically by plugging a physical jack into a wall, it is unable to satisfy the requirements of mobility. Therefore, Mobile IP has been developed to allow mobile nodes to take a temporary IP address associated with the current point of attachment to the Internet. However, Mobile IP alone is inadequate to support heterogeneous access technologies. It suffers technical obstacles such as handover performance, routing performance and security issues. At this purpose, other solutions have been developed to optimise connectivity, prevent failure and misrouting during communication, involving new schemes and new entities. For interoperation of different communication protocols, an adaptive protocol suite is required; furthermore, adaptive terminals and smart base stations will support multiple air interfaces and allow users to seamlessly switch among different access technologies. THE PROBLEM OF HANDOFF In general, the term handoff (or equivalently handover) refers to the process that transfers an ongoing communication from one channel to another as the user moves through the cells of the coverage area, while keeping active the communication itself. There may be different reasons for which handoff is performed. The most common happens when a mobile user is moving away from the area covered by one cell and entering the area covered by another cell; call or session is transferred to the new cell in order to avoid call termination as the signal strength from the old Base Station has become too weak, under a threshold or simply less strong of that of the new BS. Sometimes it may occur for a new optimal allocation of resources or to reduce interference with neighbours. It is called inter-cell handoff when the channel is assigned to the new cell or intra-cell handoff when only the used channel is changed within the same cell. If handover does not occur quickly the Quality of Service may become unacceptable in terms of delay and packet loss. Having large cells permits less frequent handoffs, while preventing a good allocation of capacity for users. On the other hand, as smaller cells are deployed to meet the demands for increased capacity, the number of handoffs increases. For this reason a good compromise is essential. Today, the scenario has become more complicated because of the overlapping of different networks, which uses various technologies and different cell size. We can distinguish between two types of roaming for Mobile Terminals: intrasystem and intersystem roaming. Intrasystem or interdomain roaming refers to moving through different cells of the same system. Mobility techniques are based on similar network interfaces and protocols, and concern to the concept of horizontal handoff. Intersystem or interdomain roaming, instead, refers to moving between different backbones, protocols, technologies or service providers and regard to vertical handoff. We classify mobility management solutions into three main categories: network layer solutions (layer 3), link layer solutions (layer 2) and cross-link solutions (layer 3 + layer 2). Network layer solutions provide mobility-related features at the IP layer: signalling messages for mobility purposes are carried by IP traffic. Link layer solutions are coupled with the specific wireless technology. Cross-layer solutions achieve layer 3 handoff with help from layer 2. NETWORK LEVEL SOLUTIONS Network layer mobility management solutions can be classified into two categories: macro-mobility and micro-mobility solutions. The first refers to the movement of a mobile user between two network domains; one domain is an administrative body that may includes different access network, such as WLAN, second-generation and third-generation network of one provider. Instead, the movement of a mobile user between two subnets within one domain is referred to as micro-mobility. MACRO-MOBILITY SOLUTIONS In the Internet, a node is identified by an IP address that defines its point of attachment to the Internet, and packets are routed to the node based on this address. Mobile IP is a mobility-enabling protocol that allows redirecting datagrams for the mobile user to its current location. The communication between the Mobile Node (MN) and the Correspondent Node (CN) with which is communicating, involves two entities: the Home Agent (HA) and the Foreign Agent (FA). Here is described how Mobile IP operates, extensions and enhancements of this protocol. MOBILE IP The basic idea of Mobile IP is to extend IP by allowing the Mobile Node to effectively utilize two IP addresses, one for identification (home address) and the other for routing (Care-of Address). The standard Mobile IP consists of these main functional entities: - Mobile Node (MN): a host or router that can travel around the Internet while maintaining any ongoing communication session. The term Mobile Node (MN)

is equivalent to Mobile Terminal (MT) or Mobile Host (MH). - Home Agent (HA): a router that maintains a list of registered MNs, used to forward MN-addressed packets to the appropriate visiting network when MNs are away from home network. - Foreign Agent (FA): a router with an interface in a MNs visiting network, which assist the MN informing its HA of its current Care-of Address. - Care-of Address (CoA): A local IP address that identifies the MNs current location. - Collocated CoA: an externally obtained local IP address (e.g. by means of DHCP or PPP) temporarily assigned to the MN. - Home address: a permanent IP address assigned to an MN. - Correspondent Node (CN): A peer host with which an MN communicates. - Tunnel: the path taken by an encapsulated data packet. It leads packets from the HA to the FA. The operation of Mobile IP is based on the cooperation of three main processes: agent discovery, registration and tunnelling. - Agent discovery: mobility agents (both HA and FA) advertise their availability on each link for which they provide services. - Registration: when the MN is away from home, it registers its CoA with its HA. - Tunneling: in order for datagrams to be delivered to the MN when it is away from home, the HA has to tunnel datagrams to the CoA.

to stop working and restart its subsystem. The process of detecting a mobility agent is quite similar to that used by Internet nodes to detect routers running Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Router Discovery. Mobile IP, in fact, provides to attach special extensions to the standard ICMP messages. Figure 2 presents the mobility agent extension applied to ICMP Router Advertisement. Type specifies the extension; the flags specify special features such as registration required, FA busy, encapsulation and so on.

Figure 2. Mobility agent extension format

REGISTRATION - Once the Agent discovery process has been terminated, the Mobile Node needs to be registered to its Home Agent. Figure 3 shows the Registration Request format, attached to the IP and UDP headers. The request message allows the MN to inform its HA of its current CoA, communicates how long the MN wants to use the CoA and indicates special features. The 64-bit identification field is used for replay protection, preventing fraudulent remote redirects. The registration process is almost the same for CoA obtained by FA or Collocated CoA.

Figure 1. Mobile IP datagram flow

Figure 3. Registration request format

Figure 1 illustrates the routing of packets for and from a Mobile Node away from home. A datagram for the MN arrives on the home network via standard IP routing. The datagram is intercepted by the HA and tunnelled to the CoA. The FA receives, detunells and delivers it to the MN. Datagrams sent by the Mobile Node use the Foreign Agent as default router. AGENT DISCOVERY - During the process of agent discovery, mobility agents make themselves known by sending periodic broadcast agent advertisement messages. The MN determines its new attachment point, obtaining its Care-of Address on the foreign network soliciting or listening for agent advertisements, or contacting Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) or Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP). Nevertheless, these protocols do not allow mobility. Using DHCP, a Mobile Node would have to get another IP address with the inconvenience

After the Registration Request, the HA sends to the MN a Registration Reply message, which has a similar format, except for the code describing the status of registration. Typical values include 0 when registration is accepted, values from 66 to 88 for registration denied by the FA, while values from 130 to 136 when the registration is denied by the HA. Registration must be made secure so that fraudulent registrations can be detected and rejected. To protect against malicious users that could disrupt communications between the HA and the MN, an unforgeable number called nonce is inserted into the identification field. Authentication extensions are defined too, in which the SPI (Security Parameters Index) field selects the security contest, specifying the authentication algorithm and the secret (a shared key or a public/private key pair) used to compute the authentication. The default authentication algorithm

uses keyed-MD5 with a 128-bit message digest of the registration message. TUNNELING Tunnelling can be done by one of several algorithms, however the default algorithm that must always be supported is simple IP-within-IP encapsulation. An IP datagram is simply encapsulated by preceding it with a new IP header (the tunnel header) in which the Care-of Address is used as the destination IP address. Alternatively, minimal encapsulation can be used as long as the HA, the FA and the MN support it ad agree to do so. The length of minimal encapsulation header is 8-12 bytes respect to the minimum of 20 bytes required by a normal header using within IP-within-IP encapsulation. ENHANCEMENT IN MOBILE IP OPTIMIZED ROUTING Mobile IP suffers of so called triangular routing because packets sent to the MN, based on the scheme in figure 1, must be routed to the HA before. The solution is to use a direct route between the MNs and their CNs to bypass the HA. Correspondent Node maintains a binding cache of the CoAs of the MNs. When a CN sends packets to an MN, it first checks if it has a binding cache entry for the MN. If yes, the CN tunnels the packets directly to the CoA of the MN, otherwise HA normally intercepts and tunnels packets destined to an MN and sends a Binding Update message to the CN about the current CoA of the MN. If the FA has no longer the destination MN in its visitor list, the FA sends a Binding Warning message to the HA asking the HA to send a Binding Update message to the CN. In both cases, the CN can update its binding cache with the current CoA. When an MN registers with a new FA, it requests the new FA to notify the previous FA about the movement. This ensures that packets in flight to the old CoA are successfully forwarded. PAGING In order to save battery power consumption at MNs, IP paging is proposed as an extension for Mobile IP. Under paging, an MN is allowed to enter a power saving idle mode when it is inactive for a period of time. During the idle mode, the system knows the location of the MN with coarse accuracy defined by a paging area composed of several subnets. The MN in idle mode performs location updates only when it changes paging areas. When packets are destined to an MN in idle mode, they are terminated at a paging initiator. It buffers the packets and locates the MN by sending out IP paging messages within the paging area. After knowing the subnet where the MN resides, the paging initiator forwards the data packets to the serving FA. MOBILE IPv6 The current IPv4 addresses are only 32-bit long, not enough to support the addressing needed today. To solve this limitation, IPv6 uses 128bit addresses, improving efficiency in terms of mobility support and routing, allowing more levels of addressing hierarchies. Mobile IPv6 does not use the FA entity, but requires an extensible packet header including both home address and CoA.

MICRO-MOBILITY SOLUTIONS Mobile IP suffers of sever limitations, especially in the case of brief and rapid movements of the mobile user between two cells. Mobile IP does not provide efficient solutions in micro-mobility contexts. Tunnelling scheme creates triangle routing problem, causing packets to travel through sub-optimal routes. Furthermore, packets in flight during a handoff are misrouted, and in the worst case, lost because they are tunnelled based on the previous CoA. Finally, small cells induce to frequent handoffs, requiring registration with a distant HA that causes higher overhead and higher loss. The number of misrouted packets depends on the total time required to complete handover. To solve this problem smooth handoff and fast handoff have been introduced. Smooth means that the number of packets lost caused by a handoff should be none or negligible. Fast means the period of performing a handoff should be as short as possible. This two concept are obviously linked. The proposed solutions can be divided into two groups: tunnel-based and routing-based. Tunnel-based schemes belong to the smooth handover category and use local or hierarchical registration. The basic operation is to redirect misrouted packets from the previous Mobile Agent to the current Mobile Agent of a Mobile Node. Routingbased (or multicast-based) schemes belong to the fast handover category and maintain host-specific routes in the routers to forward packets. The host specific routes are updated based on host mobility. The common idea to prevent handover latency and a large amount of signalling is to create a hierarchy of mobile agents and to use a single registration applied to a specific region without the need of a new registration during handoffs. The common configuration consist to have a root FA associated with a domain firewall and to have all other FAs at the second level of the hierarchy, organized into a tree of FAs as shown in figure 4.

Figure 4. Hierarchical Foreign Agents

A Foreign Agent includes in its Agent Advertisements, a vector of CoAs, which are the IP addresses of all its

ancestors. When an MN arrives at a FA, it registers with its HA, not only that FA as the CoA, but all its ancestors. When a handoff occurs, MN compares the new vector of CoAs with the old one. It chooses the lowest-level FA that appears in both vectors and sends a Regional Registration Request to that FA. Any higher-level agents do not need to be informed since they belong to the same path. Hence, registration overhead is reduced. The root FA have to participate only in the initial registration with the HA with strict security associations. This is developed in Mobile IP Regional Registration (MIP-RR) and Hierarchical Mobile IP (HMIP) schemes. The smooth handoff technique improves this scheme including an additional Foreign Agent Buffering mechanism. FAs cooperate performing smooth handoff before the new registration has completed. Besides decapsulating tunnelled packets and delivering them to the MN, the FA also buffers these packets. As an extension of the registration process, the MN asks to its new FA to send a Previous Foreign Agent Notification message to its old FA. When the old FA receives this PFAN message, it re-tunnels the buffered packets to the correct MNs new FA. Packet loss during a handoff can be completely eliminated unless the MN takes too long to find a new FA. To eliminate duplicates packets, especially if handoff completes very quickly, a simple mechanism is used. When the MN receives a datagram, it buffers the pair of the source address and the identification number of the datagram. Such a sourceid pair occupies only 6 bytes. When the MN requests a smooth handoff, it includes these buffered pairs in the registration request, to be forwarded in the Previous FA Notification. The previous FA uses these source-id pairs to drop those buffered packets that have been received by the MN. The fast handoff technique is linked to the smooth handoff concept and implements the same hierarchical configuration. The substantial difference is that fast handoff uses multicast as the packet forwarding mechanism from the Domain Foreign Agent to the Base Station that is serving the Mobile Node. The Domain Foreign Agent acts as the root node of the domain. As long as the mobility of the MN is within the domain of the DFA, no location update traffic is generated. A domain, which has on top a DFA, may have two or more subnets. Agent advertisement messages containing the IP address of the DFA are broadcasted periodically at the subnet level. When an MN hears a beacon and decides to attach to the wired network, it registers with the DFA and sends the IP address of the DFA to its HA as its CoA, as in the normal procedure. When the MN moves from one cell to another, resulting in a change of serving BS, no location update is sent to the HA. Hence, after the DFA has assigned a multicast address unique within its domain to the MN, the MN itself informs the serving BS to subscribe to this multicast group. The DFA forwards packets to the MN as a multicast stream using this multicast address.

The innovative idea of the fast handoff technique is that the serving BS in turn informs all physically adjacent BSs to subscribe to the same multicast group. While only the serving BS actively forwards packets (as a unicast) to the MN, the other adjacent BSs buffer the recent few packets so that they can forward these packets to the MN when a handoff occurs. This scheme is very simple and alleviates the DFA from the task of keeping track of the exact location of the MN. Signalling is almost distributed. Minimum location update overhead is generated when a MN moves from one cell to another since the new serving BS informs its neighbouring BSs to subscribe to the multicast group assigned to the newly arrived MN. Finally, no forwarding of buffers from the old to the new BS is needed, respect to the smooth handoff technique. However, to eliminate multicast address conflict totally, mechanism of allocating multicast address globally, such as allocating a range of multicast address to each domain, must be used. Figure 5 shows the logical organization of adjacent Base Stations into Dynamic Virtual Macro-cells. These DVMs overlap each other and a BS may belong to more than one DVM, but each BS is the core of only one DVM. Only the core can transmit datagrams to the MN, while the other BSs in the same DVM should only listen. A handoff can only happen between the core and any of its adjacent BS in the same DVM. Referring to the figure below, BS1, BS2 and BS3 belong to the DVM A. BS2 is the core and handoff can only performs between BS2 and BS1 or BS2 and BS3. As the MN attaches to BS3, BS3 is the core of DVM B and handoff can only happen towards BS2 or BS4.

Figure 5. Dynamic Virtual Macro-cell for fast handover

Assuming MN is moving to the right, it hears the beacon from BS3 and decides to switch from BS2 to BS3 based on factors such as signal strength or quality of connection. The MN sends a greet message to BS3 containing the IP address of the old serving BS, the IP multicast address assigned to the MN and the IP ID of the last packet received to minimize duplicate packets. BS3 sends back a greet ack to the MN and immediately starts forwarding packets to it. BS3 also sends a notify message to the BS2 and multicasts a control message to the other members of DVM B to subscribe to the multicast group associated with the MN and start buffering packets. After receiving the notify message from BS3, BS2 sends back a notify ack, stops forwarding packets for MN but only buffers them, and finally informs BS1 to unsubscribe from the multicast group, so that BS1 stops buffering packets form the MN. A fair compromise between beacon period and buffers width is needed. A short beacon period consumes more wireless bandwidth but reduces the

amount of buffers required at the BSs. On the other hand, a longer beacon period consumes less bandwidth but increases the number of buffers needed. For the ideal case of eliminating packet loss, the amount of buffers needed at the BSs should be equivalent to the maximum possible amount of packet loss due to a handoff. Balance is performed using this simple formula: Maximum number of packet loss during a handoff = ( rendezvous time / packet inter-arrival time ) +1 where rendezvous time is the time taken for a MN to hear a beacon from a new BS after roaming out of the old BSs cell. Typical value for beacon period is 100ms, while for packet inter-arrival time is 20ms. Many protocols have been proposed among routedbased techniques. Cellular IP (CIP) supports fasthandoff and paging. It uses distributed paging cache and distributed routing cache for location management and routing, respectively. Distributed paging cache coarsely maintains the position of the idle MNs for efficient paging, while the routing cache maintains the position of an active MN up to subnet level accuracy. The HAWAII (Handoff-Aware Wireless Access Internet Infrastructure) protocol is based on the Domain Root Router to commit all issues related to mobility management within a domain. HAWAII includes three types of messages: path setup to establish the host-specific path from the Domain Root Router to the MN, path refresh to keep active the connection and prevent timeouts, and path update to update the host-specific forwarding entries in the routers along the path. LINK LAYER AND CROSS-LAYER SOLUTIONS Link layer mobility management solutions focus on the issues related to intersystem roaming between heterogeneous access network with different radio technologies and different network management techniques. There are two critical issues for intersystem roaming: the air interface protocol and the Mobile Application Part (MAP). The first refers to the radio technology used in a particular system, while the second concern to the communication in the core network to provide services to the mobile user. When a mobile terminal roams from one wireless access network to another that supports the same air interface and MAP, services are provided seamlessly. However, when the MAPs in the two systems are different, additional entities and signalling traffic are required for interworking and interoperation between dissimilar systems. The research activities can be grouped into two categories: management for adjacent dissimilar systems with partially overlapping coverage areas, and management in multitier systems where services areas of heterogeneous networks are fully overlapped. With the help of dual-mode handsets or dual-mode Home Location Register (HLR), interworking has to take care of the following functions: - format transformation and address translation:

- user profile retrieval; - signalling message transmission and connection setup; - mobility information related to intersystem roaming recording; - QoS negotiation; - authentication between systems. It is known that handoff latency is due essentially to latencies for movement detection and registration. The aim of cross-layer mobility management protocols is to reduce movement detection delay using link layer information, such as signal strength and velocity of MNs. NEW ARCHITECTURES S-MIP architecture (Seamless handoff architecture for Mobile IP) extends Mobile IP framework by adding a new entity called Decision Engine (DE) which makes handoff decisions for intradomain roaming, while for interdomain handoff, it uses Hierarchical Mobile IP handoff algorithm. S-MIP uses movement tracking of MNs to enhance performance. First, the location of a MN is tracked, and the location information is used to detect the movement pattern. Then, pattern is used to determine the next access router upon handoff, so that prepare the MN for handoff before actual handoff initiation. In this way, the movement detection latency associated with handoff is reduced. S-MIP defines three types of movement patterns: linear, stationary and stochastic. To obtain a complete integration of several wireless networks, a novel third party has been proposed. The Network Interworking Agent (NIA) provides to authentication, billing and mobility management issues during intersystem (interdomain) roaming. The basic idea is early detection of the possibility of interdomain handoff and to carry out authentications, authorization, and Mobile IP registration of the MN in the next domain. Using link layer informations and disposing to the SLAs of the two domains, the aim is to make interdomain handoff delay comparable to that of intradomain handoff delay. Note that the NIA is used only during interdomain roaming. Once the MN moves into a new domain, the NIA is no longer involved. Many other schemes and architecture have been proposed to improve micro-mobility efficiency that Mobile IP alone is not able to provide. The aim is to have an all-IP architecture to provide high-bitrate multimedia services, including voice, video and data. IP mobility support for cellular and heterogeneous wireless system, including cryptographic authentication, will be the core for future research. REFERENCES [1] J.Li, H.Chen, Mobility Support for IP-Based Networks, IEEE Commun. Mag., Oct. 2005, pp. 127132. [2] C.Perkins, Mobile IP, IEEE Comm. Mag., May 2002, pp. 66-82.

[3] I.Akyildiz, J.Xie and S.Mohanty, A Survey of Mobility Management in Next-Generation All IPBased Wireless Systems, IEEE Wireless Comm., Aug. 2004, pp.16-28. [4] C.Perkins, K.Wang, Optimized Smooth Handoffs in Mobile IP, 1999 IEEE, pp.340-346. [5] C.Tan, S.Pink and K.Lye, A Fast Handoff Scheme for Wireless Networks, ACM 1999, pp.83-90.