P-MIP: paging in mobile IP

Abstract

As the number of Mobile IP users grows, so will the signaling overhead associated with Internet mobility management in the core IP network. This presents a significant challenge to Mobile IP as the number of mobile devices scale-up. In cellular networks, registration and paging techniques are used to minimize the signaling overhead and optimize the mobility management performance. Currently, Mobile IP supports registration but not paging. In this paper, we argue that Mobile IP should be extended to support paging to improve the scalability of the protocol to handle large populations of mobile devices. To address this, we introduce P-MIP, a set of simple paging extensions for Mobile IP, and discuss the construction of paging areas, movement detection, registration, paging and data handling. We present analysis and simulation results for Mobile IP with and without paging extensions, and show that P-MIP can scale well supporting large numbers of mobile devices with reduced signaling under a wide variety of system conditions. The ns-2P-MIP source code used to evaluate the protocol in this paper is available on the web (comet.columbia.edu/pmip).