  With the introduction of a newer generation of wireless devices and
technologies, the need for an efficient architecture for IP mobility is
becoming more apparent. Several architectures have been proposed to support IP
mobility. Most studies, however, show that current architectures, in general,
fall short from satisfying the performance requirements for wireless
applications, mainly audio. Other studies have shown performance improvement by
using multicast to reduce latency and packet loss during handoff. In this
study, we propose a multicast-based architecture to support IP mobility. We
evaluate our approach through simulation, and we compare it to mainstream
approaches for IP mobility, mainly, the Mobile IP protocol. Comparison is
performed according to the required performance criteria, such as smooth
handoff and efficient routing.
  Our simulation results show significant improvement for the proposed
architecture. On average, basic Mobile IP consumes almost twice as much network
bandwidth, and experiences more than twice as much end-to-end and handoff
delays, as does our proposed architecture. Furthermore, we propose an extension
to Mobile IP to support our architecture with minimal modification.
