In this research we are looking for a new generation of mobile communication schemes much beyond MIP on the principle of Transparent and Interactive Networking. It includes mobility mechanisms that can work without requiring any pre-deployed infrastructure. In another project we are also developing space mobility- where core devices (such as routers) are moving as opposed to end-devices. We are also developing protocols such as space OSPF, or routing via non-current pathways. 

Mobile IP (MIP) supports mobility by imposing various indirections such as tunneling, pre-deployed software agents in network and triangular routing. While, Mobile IP was the first crack in offering disconnection free handoff- but in practice these degrade the traffic performance. It also causes severe ill-reaction with networks congestion control mechanisms and even disconnection.

The research has demonstrated scheme such as Interactive Protocol for Mobile Networks (IPMN) which can offer completely edge intelligence based mobility with faster hand-off, low delay, and low jitter.

Overview of IPMN
  • IPMN is based on the emerging paradigm of 'Interactive Transparent Networking' (InTraN).
  • The 'InTraN' paradigm calls for meta-engineering of existing protocols to add interactivity. Protocol end-point components are re-engineered to create an interactive version of a protocol with added handles and extended API that facilitates event passing and access to its internal state.
  • The basic idea of IPMN is to enable the mobile node to obtain a new IP from the future access router before handoff is performed, replace the 'source IP' field in its TCP/IP stack with the new IP, and relay the new IP to the correspondent node. The correspondent node immediately switches to the new IP by writing it in the 'destination IP' field in its TCP/IP stack.
  • We have implemented the scheme on the FreeBSD-4.5 kernel source. A public distribution of the modified sub-kernel is available here for interested researchers.
  • ·We have shown with experimentation on three types of traffic (Voice, WWW, and FTP) that IPMN can substantially reduce handoff latency and improve TCP performance on mobile networks.