A comparison of IP Mobility Protocols

Third generation wideband mobile networks are becoming a reality. Many operators are at the point of proposing GPRS (and soon UMTS) services to their customers. All these are actually evolving towards all-IP networks. This represents the fusion between the two famous current network technologies: the Internet and the mobile telephony/networking. IP which was designed to work with classical static networks must be enhanced to support mobility and many proposals have been made in this direction. The first is Mobile IP which is built in IPv6 but many other are willing to improve it in order to have a more efficient mobility management. This report focusses on a comparison of all these proposals in a global mobility framework. We define this framework in two steps: we first give a general description of the current (and expected) mobility landscape and we point out the major problems posed by the mobility management. These are mainly handoff management, passive connectivity, quality of service, scalability, security, ... We compare then on this base the five main IP mobility proposals: Mobile IP, Cellular IP, Hawaii, TeleMIP and EMA.