Mobility-Aware RSVP: A framework for improving the performance of multimedia services over wireless IP-based mobile networks

This paper proposes the Mobility-Aware Resource Reservation Protocol (MARSVP) in which mobility and QoS signaling are performed as a single functional block. The key concept of MARSVP is to convey mobility-specific information (binding updates and their associated acknowledgments) by using newly defined RSVP objects embedded in existing RSVP messages. An appealing feature of MARSVP is that it adheres to the current RSVP standard (RFC 2205) and thus requires minimal changes to end nodes without affecting any of the conventional RSVP routers in between. The proposed mechanism is evaluated using a simulation model for application-level performance and an analytical model for network-level signaling cost. Simulation results indicate a 27.9% improvement in QoS interruption when using Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), 12.5% when using Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), and no improvement when using Fast Handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6). On the network-level, signaling cost savings of 9.4% and 11.9% are achieved for MIPv6 and HMIPv6, respectively, while FMIPv6 achieves savings of 17.9% when using Voice-over-IP traffic and 26.7% for Video-over-IP traffic. The results of the conducted studies indicate MARSVP’s superiority to conventional RSVP when deployed over wireless networks.