Optimized I-MPLS: A Fast and Transparent Micro-Mobility-Enabled MPLS Framework

The development trend of mobile communication networks is toward an all-IP architecture. This architecture aims to interconnect the various wireless communication technologies through a common IP core. However, many challenges throughout the development are still not solved. One of these challenges is how to support a fast handover with suitable QoS. In this paper we propose a new architecture for MPLS-based micro mobility management Our proposal called Optimized Integrated-Multi-Protocol Label Switching (Optimized I-MPLS). Optimized I-MPLS is a hierarchical approach to support micro-mobility. This approach integrates the traffic engineering and QoS capabilities of MPLS with Mobile IP Fast Authentication protocol (MIFA) as a mobility management framework. The integration between MPLS and MIFA is achieved through integration of MIFA control messages with MPLS signalling traffic. Our proposal support fast and smooth handoff enhanced with flexible QoS models for down- and uplink streams. The encapsulation overhead for IP-in-IP tunneling is significantly reduced. Additionally, our approach enhances the access security and allows for the stepwise integration in existing networks. The main advantage of the proposal is the transparency for Mobile Nodes (MNs), i.e. the MNs support only MIP, while MPLS will be integrated with MIFA only in the infrastructure.