Performance analysis of mobility management architectures in cellular networks

Flattened cellular network architecture for the mobile internet is expected to meet the demands of rapidly increasing traffic from mobile users. Dynamic mobility anchoring (DMA) mechanism distributes the mobility management functions using such network architecture. In this paper, we compare DMA with a classical mobility protocol like proxy mobile IP (PMIP). A major cost factor of a mobility protocol is the management of contexts and tunnels. We propose an analytical model to compute the number of contexts and tunnels with DMA and with PMIP in a homogeneous network with random mobility of mobile nodes. The model is used under different configurations by varying the traffic loads and the capacities of access nodes in order to analyze the distributed and dynamic characteristics of DMA. The results show that the required number of contexts on an anchor node with DMA is significantly less than that required on an anchor node with PMIP and the required number of visitor contexts with DMA is significantly less in magnitude than that with PMIP for most of the configurations. The results also show that the number of required tunnels with DMA is less than those required with PMIP for most configurations.