Performance of transport protocols over a multicasting-based architecture for Internet host mobility

IP multicasting provides a mechanism for location independent addressing and packet delivery to a group of hosts that belong to a multicast group. It also provides efficient mechanisms for hosts to join and leave multicast groups. The problem of supporting macro and micro level host mobility in the Internet involves similar issues of location independent addressing, address translation, packet forwarding and location management of mobile hosts. We have developed a new approach called MSM-IP for supporting host mobility using IP multicasting as the sole mechanism for addressing and routing packets to mobile hosts. In this paper, we present the performance of UDP and TCP over MSM-IP, and compare it with their performance over Mobile-IP. Our analysis shows that our approach is very effective in supporting seamless mobility for both handoffs and interface changes within and across networks. The performance of both UDP and TCP are better when used with MSM-IP than with Mobile-IP. We briefly explain our approach, and present performance results, and explain the results