Design and performance evaluation of distributed mobility management schemes for network mobility

Abstract

Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) is a current alternative paradigm for developing IP mobility management schemes to address the centralised mobility management problems in existing IP mobility management schemes. This is to allow these schemes to cope with the current increase in the number of mobile users and mobile data traffic volume, as well as the trend in the mobile Internet towards a flat architecture. To date, schemes׳ development based on DMM approach is still at preliminary stages in the IETF, and there is no current standard in place. In this paper, we develop network-based DMM schemes for the Network Mobility (NEMO). The schemes are developed for non-nested and nested NEMO scenarios – with the goal of mitigating the sub-optimal routing, high packet overhead and packet delivery latency, especially in a nested NEMO scenario, due to the employment of a centralized mobility management approach in NEMO. Additionally, the proposed scheme improves the packet delivery and location update (i.e., binding update) costs. The paper presents in detail the schemes’ design, operation mechanism, and the performance evaluation (through analytical and simulation in ns-2). Both the analytical and simulation results show that the proposed schemes yield a significant improvement – in terms of reducing packet overhead and packet delivery latency, as well as binding update and packet delivery costs.