Appears in Proceedings of the
3rd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS '04)
Economies of scale and advancements in wide-area wireless networking are leading to the
availability of more small, networked mobile devices, placing higher stress on existing
mobility infrastructures. This problem is exacerbated by the formation of mobile crowds
that generate storms of location update traffic as they cross boundaries between base
stations. In this paper, we present a novel aggregation technique we call type
indirection that allows mobile crowds to roam as single mobile entities. We discuss
our design in the context of Warp, a mobility infrastructure based on a peer-to-peer
overlay, and show that its performance approaches that of Mobile IP with optimizations
while significantly reducing the effect of handoff storms.