A Pointer Forwarding Scheme for Minimizing Signaling Costs in Proxy Mobile IPv6 Networks

Proxy Mobile IPv6(PMIPv6) is a network-based mobility management protocol to support mobility for IPv6 nodes without host involvement. In PMIPv6, the Mobile Access Gateway(MAG) incurs a high signaling cost to update the location of a mobile node to the remote local mobility anchor(LMA) if the mobile node moves frequently. This increases network overhead on the LMA, wastes network resources, and lengthens the delay time. Therefore, we propose a new mobility management scheme for minimizing signaling cost using the pointer forwarding. Our proposal can reduce signaling costs by registration with the neighbor MAGs instead of the remote LMA using the pointer forwarding. The cost analysis using imbedded Markov chain presented in this paper shows that our proposal can achieve performance superior that of PMIPv6 scheme.