Adaptive Mobility Management for IP/MPLS-Based Wireless Networks: A Proposal and Analysis

In this paper, we propose a new adaptive MPLS-enabled micro-mobility management scheme designed to track efficiently the mobility of nodes so as to minimize both handoff latency and total signaling cost while ensuring the mobile node´s QoS requirements. To achieve this, we introduce a new concept called residing area. Accordingly, the micro-mobility domain is divided into virtual residing areas where the MN limits its signaling exchanges within this local region instead of communicating with the relatively far away root of the domain at each handoff occurrence. One of the key distinguishing features of our solution from existing literature is its adaptive nature since the virtual residing areas are constructed according to the current network state and the QoS constraints. To evaluate the efficiency of our proposal, we compare our scheme with existing solutions using both analytical and simulation approaches. Numerical and simulation results show that our proposed scheme can significantly reduce registration updates and link usage costs and provide low handoff latency under various scenarios.