Seamless QoS guarantees in mobile internet using selective advance resource reservation scheme

Abstract

In this dissertation, we propose a QoS guarantee mechanism based on the advance resource reservation scheme for Mobile IP networks. Though the advance reservation is an effective solution to reduce the latency and eliminate service disruption due to host mobility, most existing approaches suffer from excessive reservation requirements driven by proactive resource reservations at all the locations that a mobile host (MH) may visit. The existing solutions to eliminate this overhead require considerable modifications to the current Internet protocols and components. The proposed mechanism, called $\It{Selective Advance Reservations and Resource-aware Handoff Direction}$ (SARAH), efficiently addresses the issue of excessive resource reservation while requiring fewer functional and structural changes to the current Internet environment. It employs a movement detection scheme using link layer functionalities and establishes advance reservations 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 base station (BS) according to not only the link layer signal strength but also the available amount of resources when multiple BSs are reachable. This scheme is effective in improving QoS guarantees attained by SARAH, particularly in the congested networks. Since all the enhanced features are integrated into leaf BSs and MHs only, SARAH does not require the intermediate routers to be modified. More importantly, it requires no changes to the existing RSVP and Mobile IP protocol. Performance of SARAH was evaluated and analyzed with a real implementation and simulation methods. The measured results from the testbed show that SARAH imposes no further delays to the original Mobile IP handoff latency while improving its QoS performance. Experiments with MPEG video streaming services on the testbed demonstrate that SARAH seamlessly guarantees a desirable QoS for a MH movi...