Location management of mobile hosts by grouping routers

Abstract

In mobile computing environments, the location of each mobile host should be managed by the networking system to realize communication among mobile hosts. Thus, traffic is caused not only by the communication but also by the location management. In this paper, we propose a location management method for improving the mobile communication throughput based on grouping of touters. First, this method divides the routers in a fixed network into multiple groups. Then, the routers in each group manage the location information independently of other groups by choosing a location management strategy from several conventional strategies. We show the results of our simulation experiments to compare the traffic volume of our method and Mobile-IP. The results show that our method can greatly reduce the traffic volume compared with Mobile-IP. We also discuss the communication overhead of our method and show that our method can be practically used in the real environment. Moreover, we address some problems of our method and show possible extensions to solve them.