Improvements on IP - IAPP: A fast IP handoff protocol for IEEE 802.11 wireless and mobile clients

TitleImprovements on IP - IAPP: A fast IP handoff protocol for IEEE 802.11 wireless and mobile clients
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2007
AuthorsBouras, C, Sampraku, I, Karoubalis, T
JournalWINET Journal, Special Issue on Broadband Wireless Multimedia, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol. 13, No. 4
Pagination 497 - 510
Abstract

One of the most critical issues in introducingWireless
LAN (WLAN) real-time and delay sensitive applications,
such asVoice over IP (VoIP), is guaranteeing IP service
continuation during inter-subnet Basic Service Set (BSS)
transitions. Even though WLANs offer very high channel
bandwidth, they exhibit long network-layer handoff latency.
This is a restraining factor for mobile clients using interactive
multimedia applications such as VoIP or video streaming.
In a previous work, we presented a novel fast and efficient
IP mobility solution, called ?IP-IAPP?, which offers
constant IP connectivity to the 802.11 mobile users and successfully
preserves their ongoing sessions, even during subnet
handoffs (fast recovery of active connections). It is an
802.11-dependent IP mobility solution, which accelerates
the network reconfiguration phase after subnet handoffs and
significantly reduces the IP handoff latency. It restores L3
connectivity almost simultaneously to the L2 connectivity
after a subnet handoff, due to a zero-delay movement detection
method. As a result, even the most demanding next generation WLAN applications such as Voice over WLAN
(VoWLAN) suffer insignificant disruption. In this paper we
present an improved version of the IP-IAPP mobility mechanism
(new optimized protocol procedures). Certain extensions
have also been incorporated to the initial proposal, for
the provision of more advanced services: (a) secure inter-AP
IP-IAPP communications, (b) zero patching on the clients
s/w, and (c) support of clients which use a dynamic IP address.
Performance measurements out of further and more
complex testing verify that the proposed method outperforms
other existing mobility solutions, and still introduces the
lesser imperative amendments to the existing 802.11 wireless
LAN framework.