Adaptive location management strategy for mobile IP

Abstract

Mobile internetworking revolves around the premise that a mobile host (MH) will frequently attach to and detach from the Internet, thus changing its address frequently. Location management in mobile internetworking refers to the process of keeping track of the current addresses of MHs in the Internet. Protocols proposed for mobile internetworking rely on a combination of searches and updates for location management. A drawback of these protocols is that they are not uniformly efficient over all possible call-to-mobility ratios (i.e., the relative frequency of searches as compared to updates). An important issue, therefore, is how the overall costs of location management can be reduced, regardless of the call-to-mobility ratio. The aim of this work is to explore a new and practical scheme for location management, with emphasis on network cost reduction. We make the key observation that while the potential set of sources for the MH may be large, the set of sources that a given MH communicates most frequently with is very small. Based on this, we develop the concept of a working set of hosts for the MH (similar to the working set concept in operating system). An adaptive scheme of location management is proposed, that enables an MH to dynamically determine its working set, and trade-off routing and update costs in order to reduce the total cost. Comparative analysis of the proposed scheme, using simulation, shows its efficiency over a wide range of call-to-mobility ratios.