Comprehensive performance evaluation of distributed and dynamic mobility routing strategy

Abstract

In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive performance study of distributed and dynamic mobility management (DDMM). DDMM presents a new architectural paradigm for a sustainable mobile networking against an ever-increasing amount of Internet data traffic, providing IP mobility management with distributed deployment of mobility anchors and dynamic activation when mobility is needed. Such a distributed mobility management concept is generally and intuitively accepted in terms of effective distribution of mobile traffic when compared with centralized mobility management (CMM) approaches. Nevertheless, the routing strategy of DDMM has not yet been properly examined through performance studies, and especially the impact of potential mobility routing strategies on the user plane is an open question. We perform a mathematical analysis of DDMM and present numerical results aiming to identify in which conditions, by which factors, and how much, DDMM improves mobility performance. For comparison, Mobile IPv6, Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6), and PMIPv6 localized routing (PMIPv6-LR) were considered as representative IP mobility protocols following CMM approaches. Analytical results demonstrate that DDMM generally achieves higher performance when compared with CMM-based protocols in terms of packet delivery cost, tunneling overhead, and throughput, but specific performance varies in function of multiple input parameters.