A novel load control and mobility management scheme for hierarchical mobile IPv6 networks

Hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) aims to reduce signaling overhead and to minimize packet loss during handover. However, performance evaluation shows that HMIPv6 cannot outperform the standard mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) in all the scenarios. An adaptive scheme to choose a proper protocol between HMIPv6 and MIPv6 is needed. Furthermore, the proposed multilevel hierarchical mobile IPv6 (M-HMIPv6) suffers from load concentration at particular mobility anchor point (MAP). In this paper we introduce an efficient three-level hierarchical architecture for mobility management under HMIPv6. According to the number of connecting CNs and its speed, a MN may register its RCoA with a higher-level/lower-level MAP, or register its LCoA with the home agent. Using this MAP selection algorithm, a MN can determine whether it should adopt HMIPv6 or not. Each MAP performs admission control according to the total number of CNs (not MNs) that it serves. Thus load balancing between two MAP levels and among different MAPs within the same MAP level can be achieved. Moreover, we introduce a mechanism which enables the MAP to dynamically adjust the MNs it serves when the number of CNs of certain MN changes