Performance comparison of end-to-end mobility management protocols for TCP

Mobility management for TCP connections has been discussed in literature since last several years. Many mobility management solutions have been proposed including end-to-end solutions and infrastructure dependent solutions. These solutions operate at different layers of TCP/IP protocol stack. End-to-end mobility management solutions have the advantage of not requiring the deployment of additional entities in network infrastructure to handle mobility management as compared to the infrastructure dependant solutions. Performance analysis of these end-to-end mobility management protocols seems missing in literature. In this paper, we analyze the performance of different end-to-end mobility management protocols using mathematical modeling. Evaluation has been carried out for evaluating the handover delay, throughput degradation time and protocol overhead. Some security and implementation issues pertaining to these protocols have also been discussed. Results show that protocols that allow simultaneous communication through multiple network interfaces provide throughput stability during vertical handovers, thus facilitating smooth handovers.