A proactive buffering scheme to improve macro-mobility over mobile IP

Mobile IP (MIP) was designed to enable host mobility over the Internet. Because of its long registration delay, many micro-mobility management schemes have been proposed. These schemes decrease the registraton delay by handling mobility locally and improve handoff performance significantly. But the long handoff latency problem still exists when the Mobile Host (MH) changes connecting domain. Due to this long registration delay, the ongoing connections face severe end-to-end performance degradation. Traditional approach to support macro-mobility by only Mobile IP (MIP) cannot overcome this performance degradation. In order to improve macro-mobility performance, we introduce a buffering scheme over Mobile IP (MIP) in this paper. Unlike the existing buffering schemes that have been mostly proposed for micro-mobility, our buffering scheme does not impose any re-encapsulation overhead on the Foreign Agents or any intervention in third party hosts. We implicitly forwards the buffered packets from the previous Foreign Agent (FA) to the Home Agent (HA). The Home Agent (HA) tunnels them to the new Point of Attachment (POA) of the Mobile Host (MH). Instead of a shortcut between the previous POA and the new POA, these packets travel on the new path from the HA to the new POA which reflects a better link status to the end hosts.