Mobility agent advertisement mechanism for supporting mobile IP in ad hoc networks

Mobile IP has been proposed to solve the problem of how a mobile node may roam from its network and still maintain connectivity to the internet. Another emerging wireless architecture, mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), can be flexibly deployed in most environments without the need for infrastructure base stations. Integrating Mobile IP and MANET will facilitate the current trend of moving to an all-IP wireless environment. In this paper we propose an architecture of integrating Mobile IP and MANET based on the on-demand routing protocols. The proposed architecture employs two agent advertisement mechanisms, Mobility Agent Advertisement Mechanism (MAAM) and Aggregation-based Mobility Agent Advertisement Mechanism (AMAAM). In both mechanisms the mobility agent uses periodic beaconing of agent advertisement messages with on-demand routing protocols. Despite its architectural advantage, MAAM has some performance issues to be tackled because it incurs excessive generation of registration request messages of mobile nodes. AMAAM is an enhancement of MAAM for reducing the overhead of the beaconing by aggregating the reply messages of the agent advertisement. The simulation results show that AMAAM can effectively reduce the overhead of periodic agent advertisement and registration process.