Nested Network Mobility on Multi-hop Cellular Network

Abstract— In recent years, the multi-hop cellular network (MCN) architecture has been actively studied due to its capability to significantly increase the cellular system’s capacity and coverage, and at the same time greatly reduce the transmission range of the mobiles. Majority of the literature on MCN, however, is based on the discussions from the physical or link layer’s point of view. In this paper, we look into the support of MCN architecture from the IP layer’s aspect. We believe that this aspect is critical for the general deployment of Internet applications on MCN because IP is the dominant supporting protocol for such applications. We introduce a new architecture based on the integration of the nested network mobility (nested NEMO), which is a pure IP layer architecture, and MCN, and name the resulting architecture the nested NEMO on MCN. We illustrate how nested NEMO on MCN operates and how it realizes the advantages provided by MCN on the IP layer. We also unveil a potential problem specific to the nested NEMO on MCN architecture, namely, recursive IP fragmentation. A simple technique to overcome this problem is also proposed.