Abstract
Mobile IP has been adopted to provide seamless services to mobile nodes. Currently, there are many mobile IP handoff schemes proposed at different layers of the network protocol stack. However, the handoff performance under different mobility patterns in terms of velocity and path has been largely ignored by the current research work. In this paper, we present our study of the mobility pattern's impact on the performance of mobile IP handoff by theoretical analysis as well as NS-2 simulations, where both deterministic and hybrid models for mobility patterns have been adopted. Our results show that the performance of mobile IP handoff schemes is directly impacted by the mobility patterns. Moreover, the cross-layer handoff schemes outperform other mobile IP handoff schemes under different mobility patterns. We conclude that the routing update delay is one of main performance bottlenecks in mobile IP handoff. So we propose a new solution to reduce the routing update delay by considering the behaviors at the lower layers such as the link layer. Furthermore, our study also presents a platform for efficient network design due to the fact that the routing update delay is tightly coupled with the deployment of access points.