An improved locator identifier split architecture (ILISA) to enhance mobility

The increased use of mobile devices has prompted the need for efficient mobility management protocols to ensure continuity of communication sessions as users switch connection between available wireless access networks in an area. Locator/Identifier (LOC/ID) split architectures are designed to, among other functions, enable the mobility of nodes on the Internet. The protocols based on these architectures enable mobility by ensuring that the identifier (IP address) used for creating a communication session is maintained throughout the lifetime of the session and only the location of a mobile node (MN) is updated as the device moves. While the LOC/ID protocols ensure session continuity during handover, they experience packet loss and long service disruption times as the MN moves from one access network to another. The mobility event causes degradation of throughput, poor network utilisation, and affects the stability of some applications, such as video players. This poor performance was confirmed from the experiments we conducted on a laboratory testbed running Locator Identifier Separation Protocol MN (LISP-MN) and Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). The MIPv6, as the standardised IETF mobility protocol, was used to benchmark the performance of LISP-MN. The poor performance recorded is owed to the design of the LISP-MN’s architecture, with no specific way of handling packets that arrive during handover events. Our main aim in this thesis is to introduce an Improved Locator/Identifier Split Architecture (ILISA) designed to enhance the mobility of nodes running a LOC/ID protocol by mitigating packet loss and reducing service disruption in handovers. A new network node, Loc-server, is central to the new architecture with the task of buffering incoming packets during handover and forwarding the packets to the MN on the completion of the node’s movement process. We implemented ILISA with LISP-MN on a laboratory testbed to evaluate its performance in different mobility scenarios. Our experimental results show a significant improvement in the mobility performance of MNs as reflected by the different network parameters investigated

An improved LISP mobile node architecture

The increased use of mobile devices has prompted the need for efficient mobility management protocols to ensure continuity of communication sessions as users switch connection between available wireless access networks. Locator Identifier Separation Protocol Mobile Node (LISP-MN) was designed to enable such efficient mobility of nodes on the Internet. The protocol enables mobility by ensuring that the IP address used for creating data session is maintained throughout the lifetime of the communication session and the location of the mobile node (MN) is updated as the device moves. While session continuity is achieved during handover, we observed that LISP-MN records loss of packets in transit, long service disruption time, throughput degradation and increased rate of TCP retransmission as an MN conducts a handover from one access link to another. To mitigate the poor handover performance, we introduced a novel network node into the LISP-MN architecture, a loc-server, that buffers the packets sent to an MN during handover and forwards to the device upon completion of the movement process. We analysed both qualitative features and quantitative measurements of vanilla LISP-MN against LISP-MN with loc-server support. Results show that the improved architecture significantly improved the performance of LISP-MN in all the investigated parameters