Comparative Handover Performance Analysis of IPv6 Mobility Management Protocols

IPv6 mobility management is one of the most challenging research topics for enabling mobility service in the forthcoming mobile wireless ecosystems. The Internet Engineering Task Force has been working for developing efficient IPv6 mobility management protocols. As a result, Mobile IPv6 and its extensions such as Fast Mobile IPv6 and Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 have been developed as host-based mobility management protocols. While the host-based mobility management protocols were being enhanced, the network-based mobility management protocols such as Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) and Fast Proxy Mobile IPv6 (FPMIPv6) have been standardized. In this paper, we analyze and compare existing IPv6 mobility management protocols including the recently standardized PMIPv6 and FPMIPv6. We identify each IPv6 mobility management protocol´s characteristics and performance indicators by examining handover operations. Then, we analyze the performance of the IPv6 mobility management protocols in terms of handover latency, handover blocking probability, and packet loss. Through the conducted numerical results, we summarize considerations for handover performance.