A Comprehensive Analysis of Mobility Management in MPLS-Based Wireless Access Networks

Efficient mobility management is one of the major challenges for next-generation mobile systems. Indeed, a Mobile Node (MN) within an access network may cause excessive signaling traffic and service disruption due to frequent handoffs. The two latter effects need to be minimized to support Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of emerging multimedia applications. In this perspective, the paper propose in this paper a new mobility management scheme designed to track host mobility efficiently so as to minimize both handoff latency and signaling cost. Building on and enhancing Mobile IP and taking advantage of MPLS traffic engineering capability, three mechanisms (FH-, FC- and MFC-Micro Mobile MPLS) are introduced. In order to assess the efficiency of the proposals, all protocols are compared.