A review of mobility support paradigms for the internet

Abstract

With the development of mobile communications and Internet technology, there is a strong need to provide connectivity for roaming devices to continuously communicate with other devices on the Internet, at any time and anywhere. The key issue of this vision is how to support mobility in TCP/IP networks. In this article we review the TCP/IP protocol stack and analyze the problems associated with it in the mobile environment. We then investigate the mobility support techniques and existing solutions for providing mobility support on the Internet. We classify the proposed solutions based on the protocol layers and present paradigms for each category of layer. We also provide a comparison of the different solutions belonging to different categories, including their advantages and disadvantages. Results have shown that there is no single solution that perfectly addresses mobility support for the Internet. Finally, we conclude this survey with a recommendation of features that ought to be met in Internet mobility support.