Simulation of Wireless Networks with Mobile IP Using NS-2
Sajal Saha1, Subhasree Choudhury1, Asish K Mukhopadhyay2
1
Lecturer, Dept. of CA, Narula Institute of Technology, Kolkata 700109
2
Professor & Head, Dept. of ECE, Dr.B.C.Roy Engg. College, Durgapur-713206
e-mail:{ sajalkrsaha, subho_only,asishkm55}@rediffmail.com
Abstract: This paper presents the procedural steps for
creating network architecture for implementation of
Mobile IP protocol in NS2 simulator. Performance
analysis with simulation using NS-2 shows that the
architecture and protocol keeps the delay and handoff
within the accepted level without any call drop.
Keywords: Mobile IP, Micromobility, Macromobility
, CoA
1. Introduction
Now-a-days varieties of networks with varieties of
objectives are coexisting under the heterogeneous
environment. It is essential from the user point of
view to have ubiquitous mode of network
accessibility and globally transparent to all the users.
At the same time, new application demands more
bandwidth and lower costs. Therefore a lot of interest
has been generated amongst the researcher during past
few years providing a transparent ubiquitous
communication between dissimilar networks under
heterogeneous environment. Our aim is to study such
efforts of integration using the network layer protocol
Mobile IP. We use network simulator NS-2 for
simulation. NS suffers from a number of
incompatibilities and shortcomings, which limit its
usage and development of protocols for new scenarios
in wired, wireless, mobile and related to future
heterogeneous networks. Our aim in this paper is to
present a clear and generalized procedure for
implementing mobile-IP protocol in NS-2.30.
Creation of a network topology and implementation
of mobile IP protocol in this network architecture is
done here. Simulation results show that handoff
latency is within the accepted level and this is the
main contribution of this paper.
Rest of the paper is organized in the following:
Chapter 2 highlights the background and related work.
Chapter 3 discusses the mobility support with Mobile
IP. Chapter 4 discusses implementation of Mobile IP
protocol in NS-2 simulator followed by the simulation
results and their analysis. The conclusion is drawn in
Chapter 5.
1. Background and Related Work
When a MN leaves its home location HA keeps track
of its current binding. MN sends BU (Binding
Update) both to the HA and CN.A packet destined to
MN comes to the HA first , HA intercepts the packet
and tunnels it to the MN using encapsulation. From
the next onwards packets are forwarded directly to the
MN’s current CoA (Care Of Address).In this way
MIPv6 avoids triangular routing problem using route
optimization. Several mechanisms have been
proposed to reduce the MIPv6 hand-off latency &
packet loss. Among them HMIPv6 (Hierarchical
MobileIPv6) & Fast handover Mobile IPv6
(FHMIPv6), Simultaneous binding supports
macromobilty. All these work dealt with horizontal
hand-off. MosquitoNet is the first project to integrate
different wireless network technology to support
vertical hand-off or Global mobility. HAWAII, DMA,
TR45.6 supports both Macromobilty and Global
mobility. MIP & MIPv6 supports global mobility
only. A comparative study of these mobile IP
protocols are discussed in detail in [1].
Mobile IP together with AAA combines personal and
terminal mobility with roaming services. Personal
mobility which enables the mobile user to reach
services and be reachable for incoming service
requests by holding a stable identity. Terminal
mobility on the other hand enables the mobile user to
move while maintaining the connections to services
always connected, always reachable, utilizing an IETF
standard based solution [2]. Mobile IP suffers from
several well-known weaknesses that have led to the
definition of the macro/micro mobility architecture.
Some of the weaknesses are latency and control
traffic, address space and quality of service [3].
Three main issues that affect Mobile IP’s handoff
performance, mobility detection, re-registration,
interaction with higher layer protocols are discussed
in [4]. Two schemes are proposed first one using link
identifier to accelerate the course of MH's mobility
detection, and other schemes to improve TCP
performance when MH acts as the TCP sender or
receiver respectively.
3. Mobility Support with Mobile IP
Mobile IP version 4 defined in RFC 3344 [5], or
MIPv4, is a routing protocol standardized by the IETF
(Internet Engineering Task Force) to offer Internet
mobility for the mobile hosts. It is applicable on top
of current IPv4 wired network without any need of
modification in the existing fixed hosts and routers. A
mobile host needs to be allowed to change its access
location under mobile conditions while retaining its IP
addresses associated with the fixed network whereas,
a higher layer connection does not allow changes of
either the source or destination IP address. Other
important issues such as security, Internet mobility
management and QoS are also of great concern in
designing the protocol. The following are the salient
features of MIPv4 protocol:
1. A mobile host is able to continue its (Figure 1)
communications with other Internet nodes even
when its access network changes, retaining its
original IP address all through.
Figure 1: Mobile IP topology
2. It is fully compatible with IPv4 and both may co-
exist in a network without any conflict.
3. It introduces new and more security features to
the existing IPv4 since the physical link to which
a mobile host directly connects is wireless which
is more vulnerable to attacks (Figure 2) by
malicious hosts and interference.
4. Minimum numbers of signaling messages with
minimum packet size are sent over the wireless
links due to the substantially lower bandwidth of
wireless link compared to that of wired links.
5. It takes care of handoff latency during mobility so
that communication is not lost.
Figure 2: Mobile IP operation
(Mobile node is connected to foreign network)
MIPv4 introduces two new network nodes called
Home Agent (HA) and Foreign Agent (FA)
corresponding to home network and foreign network
respectively. It also defines two types of IP address
called home address and care-of address (CoA). HA
assigned to a Mobile Node (MN) remains unchanged
while the MN is moving. CoA refers to the IP address
of the FA in the foreign network where the MN has
moved. The network with a network prefix matching
that of an MN’s home address is considered as the
MN’s home network, while any network other than its
home network is considered as foreign network. The
HA is a router on an MN’s home network that
forwards datagram to the MN when it is away from
home,
Figure 3: Tunneling (IP-within-IP)
and maintains current location information for the
MN. The FA is a router on an MN’s foreign network
that provides routing services to the registered MN. In
addition, either an HA or an FA can be called a
Mobility Agent (MA). MIPv4 combines three major
functions: agent discovery, registration, and tunneling.
4. Mobile IP in NS-2
We describe the implementation of mobile IP in NS-2
in the following steps.
STEP 1: Defining the type of each of the network
components like channel, radio propagation model,
interface queue, MAC layer, Link layer, antenna,
network interface, topological hierarchy and also the
routing protocol, number of MNs, number of BS
nodes, number of WNs, X and Y dimensions of the
topography, and simulation time. TCP connection
and movement of the MN is also defined in the script.
STEP 2: Structuring the address type of ns instance
into hierarchical format. Set the number of domains,
number of clusters in each domain and number of
nodes in each cluster.
STEP 3: Set up ns trace and nam files for wireless-
MIPv4.
STEP 4: Creation of the WNs in domain 0 and 4
(although any domain can be chosen). For all nodes
created, hierarchical addresses of the nodes need to be
defined in the respective modules. Two WNs may
reside in the same domain (0.0.0) [8] [9] but in two
different clusters (0.0.0) & (0.1.0). The first domain
(domain 1) contains HA and 11 wireless MN. All MN
reside in the same cluster. For the second wireless
domain (domain 2) a FA is configured with an
address of 2.0.0. Invoke MIP by turning MOBILE IP
flag ON. Create MN by turning wired routing OFF.
Based on the registration/beacons exchanged between
the MN and the base-station node (of the domain the
MN is currently in), the base-station's address is
assigned as the MNs CoA. Thus in this simulation,
address of HA is assigned initially as the CoA of MN.
As MN moves in to the domain of FA, its CoA
changes to that of the FA.
STEP 5: Initiation of the movement of the MN from
the home network towards the foreign network with
pre-assigned mobility. Its return time to the home
network is also assigned.
STEP 6: Creation of the link between WN and the BS
(acting as HA/FA). Setup TCP and FTP connections
between a WN (acting as CN) and the MN through
the HA.
STEP 7: Specifying the stop time indicates the end
of simulation run. The MN is then reset to its initial
position.
4.1 Simulation and Analysis of Mobile IP
For the simulation & analysis of Mobile IP protocol
[6] we use software simulation tool network simulator
(NS2) distribution. As discussed in [7], the
incompatibilities and difficulties of NS-2 need to be
resolved for analyzing new scenarios in wired,
wireless, mobile and heterogeneous networks.
Figure 4. Variation of Handoff latency with packet size
Scenario 1: Network topology as shown in Figure 5
and figure 6, there are two HA and FA of the two
networks represented in red and blue color. One CN,
one WN and eleven MN (represented in black color)
reside in the network diagram.
Scenario 2: At time t1, MN6 is in the home network.
CN1 sends packets to HA .HA then delivers the
packets to MN6 as shown in Figure 6.
Scenario 3:At time t2 when MN6 moves towards the
foreign network, then FA of that network drops
packets as shown in Figure 7.
Scenario 4:At time t3 as shown Figure 8 when MN6
is in the foreign network, HA of the previous network
encapsulates packets and delivers to FA. FA sends the
packets to WN and WN delivers them to MN6.
The simulation scenario described above is done with
packet size 200 byte and other parameters specified in
Table 1. We measured the handoff latency with
varying packet size as shown in Figure 4. It is seen
that increase of handoff latency is not uniform.
Table 1: Some important parameters taken
Queue Type DropTail/PriQueue
Interface Queue length 2000
MAC MAC/802_11
Adhoc Routing DSDV
TCP packet size in byte 200
5. Conclusion
The main contribution of this work is to deduce and
provide a clear methodology for implementing Mobile
IP in NS-2.30 for terminal mobility with roaming
services. It has also analyzed the performance of the
protocol with varying packet size and is found to be
satisfactory to avoid call drop.
References
[1]Saha, D.; Mukherjee, A.; Misra, Iti.S.; Chakraborty, M.;
Subhash, N.”Mobility support in IP: a survey of related protocols”,
IEEE Network Magazine,Volume 18, Issue 6, pp. 34 – 40,Nov.-
Dec. 2004
[2] IP Unplugged “Mobility and Mobile IP, Introduction, white
paper” Doc Number: IPU -2001:0002, Rev C
[3] Pierre Reinbold and Olivier Bonaventure, “A comparison of IP
mobility protocols”.
[4] LIU Yu, YE Min-hua, ZHANG Hui-min, “The Handoff
Schemes in Mobile IP”, Vehicular Technology Conference, VTC
2003-Spring, p 485- 489 vol.1, 22-25 April 2003
[5] C. Perkins, “IP Encapsulation within IP”, RFC 2003, October
1996.
[6]Sibram Khara, ”The Methods to Implement a New Application
Protocol Using Network Simulator”, IEEE WieNSET-2007, 29-30
June, 2007.
[7] Nino Kubinidze, Ivan Ganchev, Mairtfn O'Droma, ”Network
Simulator NS2: Shortcomings Potential Development and
Enhancement Strategies”.
[8]The VINT Project, "The NS Manual",
http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/NS/NS-documentation.html, 2007.
[9]Marc Greis' Tutorial for the UCB/LBNL/VINT Network
Simulator "ns", http://www.isi.edu/nsnam/ns/tutorial/
 Figure 5: Network Topology to implement mobile IP

Figure 6: MN6 receives packets from HA

Figure 7: MN6 moves towards foreign network and FA of foreign network drop packets

Figure 8: MN6 receives packets through foreign agent