Performance analysis of IP paging and power saving mode in IP-based mobile networks

In mobile IP, mobile node (MN) registers its location whenever it changes its foreign agent (FA) and this results in unnecessary registrations if the traffic activity of the MN is low. IP paging has been proposed in order to avoid the unnecessary registration signaling load and power consumption of mobile IP. In IP paging, the concept of paging area (PA), which consists of a number of FA areas (i.e., cells), is proposed and MN updates its location only if it changes PA rather than cell when the traffic activity of the MN is low. The IP paging is, however, basically based on IP layer protocol and it alone cannot provide sufficient power saving. Thus, it has been proposed to incorporate layer 2 power saving mode (PSM) in IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) with IP paging protocol in order to improve the power saving capability. In this paper, the performance of IP-based mobile networks with IP paging is analyzed first. Then, three representative PSM schemes are introduced and the performance of these PSM schemes is analyzed in terms of power consumption cost, and wake-up and delay cost. These results can be used in selecting system parameters appropriately.