MPLS-based mobility management for wireless cellular networks

• Main Author: Xie, Kaiduan
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/14346

In order to provide full end-to-end IP based service, 3GPP proposes the concept of an IP based access network. Recently, multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) has begun deployment in the Internet backbone to provide traffic engineering. MPLS is also proposed as a transport option in the access network of next generation wireless networks. One of the critical problems associated with mobile networks is mobility management; thus, it is important to handle mobility management in an MPLS based access network. In this thesis, a domain-based MPLS mobility management scheme for wireless cellular networks, including label switched path setup when the mobile host first powers on and mobile host handoffs, is presented. A medium access control layer assisted packet recovery scheme is proposed to recover packet loss during handoff. In order to reduce the power consumption of the mobile host and signalling load in the access network, a paging server is introduced, which brings in a hierarchical structure in addition to the function of paging. Route optimization is proposed to handle situations when the two communicating parts are in the same domain, thus reducing communication delays and load on the access network. The performance of the MPLS-based mobility management scheme is studied in terms of UDP packet loss and TCP throughput. In addition, the performance of MPLS-based mobility management is compared with three other schemes for IP mobility management, Cellular IP, HAWAII, and Hierarchical Mobile IP. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of === Graduate