Telecom and Network Research Lab

The Internet Engineering Task Force has developed Mobile IP to handle mobility of Internet hosts at the network layer. Mobile IP, however, suffers from a number of drawbacks such as high handover latency, packet loss, and conflict with network security solutions. In this project, we develop, test and evaluate SIGMA, a Seamless IP-diversity based Generalized Mobility Architecture. SIGMA utilizes IP diversity to achieve a seamless handover of a mobile host, and is designed to solve many of the drawbacks of Mobile IP. SIGMA performs significantly better than Mobile IP in handover latency, packet loss, throughput, and network friendliness.

SINEMO is an extension of SIGMA architecture for NEtwork MObility (NEMO). IETF has proposed NEMO basic support protocol based on Mobile IPv6 to support mobile networks. NEMO basic support protocol inherits all the drawbacks of Mobile IPv6, such as inefficient routing path, single point bottleneck, increased handover latency and packet loss rates, and increased packet overhead etc. To address those problems, we propose a novel IP-diversity based mobile network architecture called SINEMO. The basic idea of SINEMO is to exploit IP diversity to keep the old path alive during the process of setting up the new path, thus achieving seamless handover of mobile networks between adjacent cells. In addition to seamless handover, SINEMO has a number of advantages such as easier deployment in the Internet infrastructure, co-operation with Internet's security protocols, efficient utilization of network bandwidth, etc. SINEMO's design incorporates a number of desirable features (for example, complete transparency of network mobility to the nodes in the mobile network and efficient utilization of the wireless links (i.e. minimum signaling)) for mobile networks.