Q-MEHROM: Mobility support and resource reservations for mobile senders and receivers

The increasing use of wireless networks and the popularity of multimedia applications, lead to the need for Quality of Service support in a Mobile IP-based environment. This paper investigates the reservation of resources for mobile receivers as well as senders in combination with micromobility support. We present Q-MEHROM, which is the close coupling between the micromobility protocol MEHROM and a resource reservation mechanism. In case of handoff, Q-MEHROM updates the routing information and allocates the resources for a sending or receiving mobile host simultaneously. Invalid routing information and reservations along the old path are explicitly deleted. Resource reservations along the part of the old path that overlaps with the new path are reused. Q-MEHROM uses access network topology and link state information calculated by QOSPF. Simulation results show that the control load is limited. Moreover, it consists mainly of QOSPF traffic and it is influenced by the handoff rate in the network. Q-MEHROM makes real use of the mesh links and extra uplinks, which are present in the access network to increase the robustness against link failures, to reduce handoff packet loss and to improve the performance for highly asymmetric network loads. Also, attention is paid to the differences between the mobile sender and the mobile receiver scenario.