A mobile TCP socket

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a mobile TCP socket which is the second step of our two step approach to support mobility. The first step of our approach is to support portability as reported earlier. In our mobile TCP socket, a mobile mapping is introduced, which maps TCP associations to underlying TCP connections. The mobile mapping can be implemented in the socket layer and on top of TCP/IP protocol layers. Our approach achieves high compatibility with current TCP/IP protocols, due to the fact that neither of the two steps in our approach impose any changes on TCP/IP protocols nor the underlying Link layer. At the same time, our approach can reduce both the propagation cost for distributing location information of mobile hosts and the forwarding cost for forwarding IP datagrams across the Internet. The concept of mobile mapping and its implementation details are given in this paper.