Network-based distributed mobility management: Design and analysis

Mobile IPv6 and its extensions including Proxy MIPv6 employ a centralized mobility anchor to handle mobility management of the mobile nodes. The mobility anchor is in charge of mobility routing, location management and home address allocation functions. Having all of these functions bundled in a single network entity brings performance issues such as non optimal routing via this centralized anchor, traffic bottleneck and single point of failure. Distributed mobility management is an alternative approach to overcome these issues. A network-based distributed mobility management scheme that co-locates the mobility routing function to distributed access routers with a mobility client function in different networks is presented. It provides an optimal path for both handover traffic and new traffic of the mobile nodes, and releases the burden from the centralized mobility anchor. The paper presents in detail the scheme and its principle of operation. Furthermore, it develops an analytical model to evaluate the performance of the scheme. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate better performance in terms of packet delivery cost, tunneling cost and total cost.