Physical Mobility 69
In cellular IP, location management and handoff support are integrated with routing. To
minimize control messaging, regular data packets transmitted by MHs are used to establish host
location information. Uplink packets are routed from mobile to the gateway on a hop-by-hop
basis. The path taken by these packets is cached in BSs. To route downlink packets addressed to
an MH, the path used by recent packets transmitted by the host is reversed. When the MH has no
data to transmit, it periodically sends empty IP packets to the gateway to maintain its downlink
routing state. Following the principle of passive connectivity, MHs that have not received pack-
ets for a certain period of time allow their downlink soft-state routes to timeout. ...