An efficient micro-mobility solution for SIP networks

SIP is evolving as the dominant protocol for multimedia call control in IP networks and is expected to be widely deployed in the near future. Using SIP for supporting mobility in SIP-based networks appears as a very attractive alternative to Mobile IP, taking advantage of existing SIP infrastructure and signaling, while avoiding duplication of functionality. However, existing proposals for supporting mobility with SIP are not efficient in handling micro-mobility and do not cater for all types of traffic. In this paper, we introduce Hierarchical Mobile SIP (HMSIP), for efficient micro-mobility management in SIP environments. HMSIP is a SIP-based scheme that builds on existing IP mobility protocols, aiming at integrating their key concepts in the most beneficial way. Our proposed scheme minimizes the handoff latency and the backbone signaling overhead, while catering for all types of traffic. Moreover, HMSIP can be effectively combined with micro-mobility schemes for QoS flows, producing, thus, a complete micro-mobility solution for SIP flows with QoS guarantees.