Mobility Anchor Controlled Route Optimization for Network Based Mobility Management

Future Internet Protocol mobile communications systems will implement solutions for network-based mobility management to enable mobility for terminals, which do not support Mobile IP. The Internet Engineering Task Force is specifying a base protocol for network-based mobility, which supports registration, deregistration and handover. Support for optimization will be considered in a subsequent standardization step. This paper proposes a solution to enable support for route optimization, being under control of the mobility anchor of the network-based mobility domain. The route optimization protocol solution has been specified with the objective to cope with difficult scenarios, which can occur in a network-based mobility enabled system. The protocol has been implemented and evaluated based on a base protocol specification, taking future porting into the final standard base protocol into account. Important characteristics have been obtained from a hybrid test- bed, which comprises physical and virtual network entities. The results show, that the proposed protocol sets up and maintains optimized routes efficiently.