A Robust Analytical Model of Mobile IP Handoff with Multiple Traffic Profiles

Mobile IP has been developed to provide the continuous information network access to mobile users. The performance of Mobile IP mobility management scheme is dependent on traffic characteristics and user mobility. Consequently, it is important to assess this performance in-depth through these factors. This paper introduces a novel analytical model of handoff management in mobile IP networks. The proposed model focuses on the effect the traffic types and their frame error rates on the handoff latency. It is derived based on general distribution of both successful transmission attempts and the residence time to be applicable in all cases of traffic characteristics and user mobility. The impact of the behavior of wireless connection, cell residence time, probability distribution of transmission time and the handoff time is investigated. Numerical results are obtained and presented for both TCP and UDP traffics. As expected, the reliability of TCP leads to higher handoff latency than UDP traffic. It is shown that, higher values of FER increase the probability of erroneous packet transfer across the link layer. A short retransmission time leads to end the connection most likely in the existing FA; however a long retransmission time leads to a large delivery time. The proposed model is robust in the sense that it covers the impact of all the effective parameters and can be easily extended to any distribution.