Design and evaluation of distributed and dynamic mobility management approach based on PMIPv6 and MIH protocols

The drawbacks of centralized mobility management (CMM) schemes, such as scalability, non-optimal routes, and single points of failure, led to the development of a distributed mobility management (DMM) scheme. The new DMM paradigm proposes a flatter system by moving the mobility functionalities closer to the user and distributing the control and data planes at the edge of the access network. The DMM involves two approaches: partially DMM (P-DMM), in which only the data plane is distributed while the control plane is kept centralized, and fully DMM (F-DMM), where both the control and the data planes are distributed. In this paper, we present in detail the design and operation of a proposed F-DMM approach based on the existing PMIPv6 and media independent handover protocols. We have also developed an analytical model used for comparative performance analysis of CMM, P-DMM, and F-DMM. The analytical model includes the signaling cost, data cost, tunneling cost, processing cost, handover latency, and packet loss. The numerical results show that the DMM outperforms the CMM in terms of mobility costs while the proposed F-DMM outperforms CMM and P-DMM in terms of handover latency and packet loss. Moreover, the results obtained prove the advantages of the dynamic mobility support of DMM, where the proposed approach provides better performance for a large number of corresponding nodes.