An Efficient Location and Routing Scheme for Mobile Computing Environments

One of the most important issues affecting host mobility is the location and routing scheme that allows hosts to move seamlessly from one site to another. This paper presents a method that exploits the locality properties of a host's pattern of movement and access history. Two concepts, "local region" and "patron service", are introduced based on the locality features. For each mobile host, the local region is a set of designated subnetworks within which a mobile host often moves, and the patrons are the hosts from which the majority of traffic for the mobile host originated. These are used to confine the effects of a host moving, so location updates are sent only to its local area, and to those source hosts which are most likely to call again. Our scheme has the advantages of limiting location updates, and providing optimal routing, whilst increasing network and host scalability.