A study of the scalability and performance of multi-level hierarchy for scalable mobility management wireless IP networks

This paper presents a study on the benefits of multi-level hierarchy for scalable mobility management in the wireless mobile IP context. Micro mobility management is considered. The analysis took advantage of the locality in movement and call activities of mobile users. It was discovered that whether multi-level hierarchy is beneficial or not depends on the type of address management employed in the mobility management. When hierarchical address structure is used in a micro mobility region, the system scales with more levels of hierarchy, but if the address structure used is not hierarchical, multi-level hierarchy is less scalable because the root node presents a bottleneck to the system.