Distributed mobility management with distributed routing management at access routers for network-based mobility support

Abstract

Currently existing IP mobility management protocols deploy a centralized anchor to manage mobility of the mobile nodes in both control- and data-planes. As a result the data traffic and mobility control signaling for all the mobile nodes registered in the network are handled by the centralized mobility anchor. Considering the ever increasing number of mobile users and mobile data traffic volume, the centralized mobility management approach presents performance drawbacks, such as low scalability, traffic bottleneck, and single point of failure. Furthermore, this approach causes non-optimal routing and creates significant delays on packets, especially when the two communicating nodes are close to each other yet far from the mobility anchor. However, mobility management schemes developed based on a distributed mobility management (DMM) approach can overcome these limitations. In this paper, we present a network-based DMM scheme which eliminates the drawbacks of the centralized mobility management approach such as the traffic bottlenecks and single point of failure. Furthermore, our proposed scheme optimizes the route for ongoing mobile node communication(s), such that both handover and newly established communications are optimally routed. Analytical and simulation results show that the proposed schemes yield a significant improvement with respect to the currently proposed DMM schemes—in terms of reducing packet delivery cost, tunneling cost, and total cost as well as end-to-end packet delivery delay and handover delay.