A hybrid centralized-distributed mobility management architecture for Network Mobility

In the mobile era, the demand for Internet connection for moving vehicles (such as cars, buses and subways) is growing fast. The Network Mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol (B-NEMO) was introduced to provide Internet access for a group of users in a moving vehicle in an effective manner. As an extension of Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), B-NEMO inherits the limitations from both the host-based and the centralized mobility management protocol such as sub-optimal routing (especially, in the nested NEMO scenario), reliability and scalability issues. Recently, Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) has been introduced as a new trend to overcome the limitations of the centralized mobility management protocols. However, DMM may not be a suitable scheme for moving vehicles since it faces several challenges such as complex address and tunnel management, high signaling cost, and long handover latency in case of users moving at a high speed. In this document, we propose a hybrid centralized-distributed mobility management architecture in the context of NEMO. Our solution allows the devices to obtain connectivity either from fixed locations or mobile platforms (e.g., a NEMO) and move between them, while keeping their on-going flows. The numerical results showed that the solution helps keeping the advantages of DMM approach in terms of signaling cost, packet delivery cost, handover latency, and end-to-end delay even in the moving vehicle scenario.