Distributed IP mobility management from the perspective of the IETF: motivations, requirements, approaches, comparison, and challenges

The recent explosion of mobile Internet traffic is accelerating the evolution of mobile network architectures toward flat architectures with all IP backhaul support. IP mobility support protocols are thus required to be adopted in such mobile network architectures. Accordingly, the IETF Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) working group was recently chartered to address such architectural changes with rapidly increasing mobile Internet usages. Unlike existing IP mobility support protocols, DMM protocols being considered at the IETF aim at distributing mobile Internet traffic in an optimal way while not relying on centrally deployed mobility anchors. In this article, we first discuss motivations and requirements of DMM. We then present two different possible approaches: host-based and network-based DMM approaches. Furthermore, comprehensive comparison results are provided. Finally, we discuss challenges in developments of DMM protocols.