| In this thesis we concentrate our attention on the network layer performance by studying the number and size of the messages exchanged during the critical phases as well as the efficiency of the routing of packets from and towards the mobile node. The draft proposal for route optimization in Mobile Internet Protocol (IP) is also considered and its improved routing performance is compared to the base Mobile IP and Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) protocols.; The performance of the two protocols as well as three variations: intra-area handoff for CDPD, multiple bindings for Mobile IP and the route optimization proposal for Mobile IP, are measured using the Optimized Network Engineering Tools (OPNET) simulation package. The simulation results are verified using analytical queueing methods. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is used as the transport layer for all protocols and various scenarios of operation of the mobile connection are applied, such as a file transfer with a constant stream of equally sized packets and a Poisson stream of packets.; CDPD and the base Mobile IP protocol simulations show very little differences in their performance in spite of CDPD's use of slightly shorter registration packets. In addition, the simulations show a significant improvement of throughput and end-to-end delay for the optimized Mobile IP while the mobile node is operating within a single cell. The improvement depends on the extra overhead introduced by the triangular routing of the base protocols. During handoffs, however, optimized Mobile IP is outperformed by both the base Mobile IP and CDPD due to the outdated location caching. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
