A novel layer 3 based movement detection algorithm for improving the performance of mobile IP

Mobile IP (MIP) provides efficient mobility support to applications at transport layer or above. MIP can provide better quality of service (QoS) in heterogeneous environment if it relies on layer 3 based movement detection techniques. Among the existing movement detection algorithms (MDAs), enhanced lazy cell switching (ELCS) provides better performance compared to eager cell switching (ErCS) and early cell switching (EyCS) by reducing movement detection delay when the mobile node (MN) crosses the overlapping cells. On the other hand, movement detection delay incurred by ErCS is always low compared to ELCS while the MN crosses adjacent cells. Thus, in this paper we propose a new MDA by retaining the positive features of ErCS and ELCS to provide better QoS in a network that comprises overlapping cells and adjacent cells. Our proposed MDA reduces the usage of radio resources of the MN and foreign agent (FA) in overlapping zone compared to ELCS. The simulation results on NS-2 demonstrates that our proposed MDA improves the performance of MIP as compared to other MDAs in terms of number of TCP data packets received by the MN, TCP throughput and amount of data transferred during simulation while MN crosses the overlapping area of two cells as well as when it roams in a network consisting of both types of cells overlapping and adjacent.