Effect of Connection Rerouting on Application Performance in Mobile Networks

The increasing deployment of wireless access technology, along with the emergence of high speed integrated service networks, such as ATM, promises to provide mobile users with ubiquitous access to multimedia information in the near future. One of the key problems in building connection-oriented ATM networks that support host mobility is designing mechanisms for rerouting virtual circuits to maintain data flow to and from mobile hosts. Ideally, VC rerouting must be done fast enough so as to cause minimal disruption to applications while minimizing the signaling overhead. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of several virtual circuit rerouting strategies on application performance. We initially identify the primitive operations required by any rerouting policy and use this to analytically quantify the cost of each rerouting policy in terms of wireless link disruption as a function of various network parameters. We then evaluate the effect of the VC rerouting policy on application-level performance using simulations. Our results show that the effect of rerouting policies are strongly dependent on the transport protocol policies and application QoS requirements, in addition to the network topology.