Selective advance reservations based on host movement detection and resource-aware handoff

Abstract

This paper proposes anew mechanism, which addresses the excessive advance reservation requirements of QoS guarantee methods for mobile Internet. To save resources for excessive advance reservations, the proposed mechanism employs a movement detection scheme for a mobile host (MH) using link-layer functionalities. With the movement detection scheme, advance reservations can be established at only where a MH is likely to visit soon. Another novel feature of our mechanism is resource-aware handoff direction scheme that allows a MH to choose its next BS according to not only the link-layer signal strength, but also the available amount of resources in the reachable base stations (BSs). It considerably decreases a probability that QoS is disrupted due to the failure in advance reservation request. Also, the proposed mechanism requires fewer functional and structural changes to the current Internet components and protocols since all the enhanced features are integrated only into leaf BSs and MHs. It does not suffer from the problems of the conventional approaches based on Mobile IP and RSVP Tunnel, such as nonoptimal routing path and signalling overhead. Our experiment results show that the proposed mechanism successfully eliminates the overhead for useless advance reservations while guaranteeing seamless QoS for MHs. The performance comparison demonstrates that our mechanism slightly outperforms the conventional approaches while requiring fewer modifications and additions to the existing Internet architecture. This performance advantage of the proposed mechanism becomes noticeable when the network is congested and the mobility of a host is high. Copyright (c) 2006 John Wiley & Sons. Ltd.