Multihoming Support in Mobile IP Networks: Progress, Challenges and Solutions

IP network mobility has already emerged as a key domain of wireless IP networking. The network research community has taken great interest and paid considerable attention to advance IP mobility applications. Accordingly, different advanced networking mechanisms have been considered to optimize IP network mobility. One of these mechanisms is network multi-homing which has been the focus of many IP mobility studies within the academic research and IETF communities. The combination of network mobility and multi-homing has turned into a conceivable approach to effectively deal with expanding system availability and improving the performance of mobile IP network. There are many studies proposed during the recent years to realize network multi-homing for the Network Mobility Basic Support (NEMO BS) protocol, a leading IETF IP mobility protocol. This paper studies and reviews up-to-date research works in supporting multi-homing for NEMO-based mobile IP networks. The aim is to investigate the current state of multi-homing support for NEMO networks and outline recent research directions in this regard.

Performance evaluation and implementation of IP and robust header compression schemes for TCP and UDP traffic in static and dynamic wireless contexts

Modern cellular networks utilising the long?term evolution (LTE) set of standards face an ever?increasing demand for mobile data from connected devices. Header compression is commonly employed to minimise the overhead for IP?based cellular network traffic. In this paper, we evaluate the three header compression implementations used by these networks with respect to their potential throughput increase and complexity for different mobile service scenarios over wireless IP networks. Specifically, we consider header compression as defined by (i) IP Header Compression (RFC 2507), (ii) Robust Header Compression version 1 (RFC 3095), and (iii) the recently updated Robust Header Compression version 2 (RFC 5225) with TCP/IP profile (RFC 6846). The contribution of this article is the performance evaluation of IP Header Compression (IPHC) for UDP and TCP, as well as its evaluation in contrast to the Robust Header Compression (RoHC) methods in a comparative overview for real?world mobile scenarios. Our results show that all implementations have great potential for saving bandwidth in IP?based wireless networks, even under varying channel conditions. While both RoHC versions generally provide more reliable results than IPHC, we find that on a unidirectional channel IPHC could perform better. However, if a TCP connection is prone to packet reordering (e.g., by retransmissions), IPHC?s performance drops drastically, while RoHC?s does not exhibit any significant performance reduction.

Implementing Security in Wireless MANs

The wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs) based on the 802.16 technology have recently gained a lot of interest among vendors and ISPs as the possible next development in wireless IP offering and a possible solution for the last mile Access problem. With the theoretical speed of up to 75 Mbps and with a range of several miles, 802.16 broadband wireless offers an alternative to cable modem and DSL, possibly displacing these technologies in the future. We discuss implementing security in wireless MANs with the PKM protocol that is used in 802.16 for key management and security associations management. Since device certificates are defined by the IEEE 802.16 standard, we briefly cover the issue of certificates and certificate hierarchies.