A network architecture for MPLS-based micro-mobility

Current mobile networks provide link-layer mobility as a mobile host changes its point of attachment within the scope of an access node, and provide wide-area mobility through global mobility protocols such as Mobile IP. Recently, several proposals have been made for an in- termediate level of mobility support, called micro-mobility which addresses the issues of handover latency, signaling overhead and packet loss that are inherent in wide-area mo- bility protocols. In this paper, we propose a new Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) based network architecture that imple- ments intra-domain micro-mobility using label switched path (LSP) re-direction in a traffic engineered network. We introduce an enhanced label edge router (LER), called the label edge mobility agent (LEMA) and describe the opera- tions of the network nodes in our architecture. The advan- tages of our approach, as compared with the existing pro- posals, are its distributed and scalable nature, the abilit y to provision for Quality of Service (QoS) through traffic engi- neering, its ease of gradual deployment, and its efficient de - sign and handover performance.