An ICMP-Based Mobility Management Approach Suitable for Protocol Deployment Limitation

Mobility management is one of the important tasks on wireless networks. Many approaches have been proposed in the past, but none of them have been widely deployed so far. Mobile IP (MIP) and Route Optimization (ROMIP), respectively, suffer from triangular routing problem and binding cache supporting upon each node on the entire Internet. One step toward a solution is the Mobile Routing Table (MRT), which enables edge routers to take over address binding. However, this approach demands that all the edge routers on the Internet support MRT, resulting in protocol deployment difficulties. To address this problem and to offset the limitation of the original MRT approach, we propose two different schemes, an ICMP echo scheme and an ICMP destination-unreachable scheme. These two schemes work with the MRT to efficiently find MRT-enabled routers that greatly reduce the number of triangular routes. In this paper, we analyze and compare the standard MIP and the proposed approaches. Simulation results have shown that the proposed approaches reduce transmission delay, with only a few routers supporting MRT.