Supporting Rapid Mobility via Locality in an Overlay Network

In this paper, we present Mobile Tapestry, an extension to the Tapestry overlay network protocol, that enables scalable, fault-tolerant, and timely delivery of network messages, including multimedia streams, to and from rapidly moving nodes. Mobile Tapestry efficiently supports individual mobile nodes and, by using an approach we call hierarchical mobility, it also supports large groups of mobile nodes simultaneously moving together. Mobile Tapestry leverages the Tapestry’s locality mechanisms to reduce the latency and bandwidth of mobility update traffic, while eliminating the routing inefficiencies and availability problems of IP-based mobility protocols, such as Mobile IP. Our simulation results show that Mobile Tapestry significantly outperforms Mobile IP by providing lower latency and higher fault tolerance for message delivery.