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. Several proposals have been made for an intermediate 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 mobility protocols. We propose a new multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) based network architecture that implements 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 operations of the network nodes in our architecture. The advantages of our approach, as compared with the existing proposals, are its distributed and scalable nature, the ability to provision for quality of service (QoS) through traffic engineering, its ease of gradual deployment, and its efficient design and handover performance.