The Global Universal Addressing model for IP mobility and the cellular universal IP

In 3GPP Release 5 and beyond, an All-IP architecture has been specified. This indicates that convergence of mobile applications such as voice, video and gaming to IP is not a "trend" anymore, but a reality. IP mobility has therefore been intensively studied in recent years. Majority of the existing IP mobility schemes, including Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), the current de facto standard solution for IP mobility, are designed around a two-tier addressing model. In this model, while visiting a foreign link, a mobile node (MN) is identified by its home address assigned by its home link but is located by the care-of-address (CoA) acquired from the foreign link. Incoming packets for the MN are routed to its home link as usual, but are intercepted by the home agent and tunneled to the CoA. This model is simple and is well accepted. However, when it comes to real-time applications, it also has been known to be ineffective in terms of handoff delay and bandwidth consumption due to, respectively, its lengthy CoA acquisition and the extra IP header for tunneling. The latter is especially expensive for the case of real-time applications because of the excessive overhead induced by the extra IP header (20 bytes for IPv4 and 40 bytes for IPv6) to the packet payload size (∼20-160 bytes).; Much work has been devoted to improving the two-tier addressing model, including various local mobility schemes such as HAWAII and Cellular IP. These schemes eliminate the CoA acquisition when the MNs move within one domain, but revert back to the two-tier addressing model when the mobility is across different domains (or so-called global mobility). These schemes therefore inherit all the drawbacks of the two-tier addressing model when it comes to global mobility. It has been argued that mobility across domains is rare. However, looking into the near future, this assumption is certainly not applicable to the upcoming fourth-generation (4G) wireless architecture in which the MNs can dynamically choose the best connected wireless interface among heterogeneous networks (e.g., WiFi, WiMax, etc.) of different domains as they move. Therefore, an efficient solution is needed to handle the frequent inter-domain mobility, or global mobility, in the form of heterogeneous handoffs as well.; To efficiently support global mobility, a universal addressing model, under which a mobile node is always identified and located by the same IP address globally, is an obvious answer to the problems associated with the two-tier addressing model. However, the universal addressing model has been considered to be infeasible due to difficulties in (i) inter-domain (or cross-prefix) IP routing and (ii) routing table scaling.; In this thesis, we show that (i) can be overcome when a direct Layer-3 connection between the home and any particular visiting domain is available so that inter-domain routing effectively becomes routing within the same logical hierarchy. We call a global network formed by the directly Layer-3 connected domains the Global Universal Addressing (GUA) framework. When deployed on the GUA framework, the existing local mobility schemes can easily be upgraded to support global mobility as seamlessly as local mobility with no modification needed.; To address (ii), we propose a new IP mobility scheme called Cellular Universal IP (CUIP), which runs on the GUA framework and makes use of a home route concept also proposed in this thesis. The home route concept intelligently integrates the efficiency of prefix routing and flexibility of full-address routing to achieve high performance and routing scalability under the universal addressing model. In addition, based on IPv6, CUIP makes use of the IPv6 option header to embed the route-update information of an MN in the outgoing data packets for a short period after handoff, so that global routing information can be effectively updated along the path traversed by the packets. We study the performance of CUIP quantitatively and sh...