Support of IP micro-mobility in GMPLS and EPON-based integrated network access architecture

Ethernet passive optical network (EPON) is believed to be the promising candidate for the next-generation access network. With the rapid expanding of mobile users and IP traffic in local access network, there has been an increasing urgent need to provide IP micro-mobility in EPON-based access network. In the paper, a distributed IP micro-mobility management scheme is proposed and implemented in EPON-based access network. In order to support traffic engineering and reduce handoff delay, generalized MPLS (GMPLS) is applied to the proposed architecture. By providing GMPLS-based distributed micro-mobility management, the proposed scheme remarkably reduces the signaling overhead, handoff delay and packet loss experienced by mobile users. With modeling the mobility behavior of mobile node (MN) as a Markov chain, some key parameters of the proposed architecture, such as location update cost and handoff delay, are evaluated in details. In addition, the performance comparison between our scheme and hierarchical mobile IP (HMIP) is conducted.