Network Friendliness of Mobility Management Protocols

In network layer based mobility protocols, such as mobile IP, the correspondent node is not aware of handovers and therefore continues to send data at the same rate as before the handover which may exhibit network unfriendliness, especially when the capacities of the two subnets differ significantly. On the contrary, transport layer based mobility protocols, such as SIGMA, do not show such phenomena. The objective of this paper is to evaluate and compare the network friendliness of network and transport layer based mobility protocols. Experimental results obtained from laboratory prototypes show that network unfriendliness is inevitable in the network layer based mobility protocols during handover when there is a large difference in capacities between the two networks. Transport layer based mobility protocols are, however, more network friendly than network layer based protocols.