Distributed mobility management with mobile Host Identity Protocol proxy

Muhana M Muslam,H Anthony Chan,Neco Ventura

doi:10.1186/s13638-017-0853-z

Abstract

The architectural evolution from hierarchical to flatter networks creates new challenges such as single points of failure and bottlenecks, non-optimal routing paths, scalability problems, and long handover delays. The cellular networks have been hierarchical so that they are largely built on centralized functions based on which their handover mechanisms have been built. They need to be redesigned and/or carefully optimized. The mobility extension to Host Identity Protocol (HIP) proxy, mobile HIP Proxy (MHP), provides a seamless and secure handover for the Mobile Host in the hierarchical network. However, the MHP cannot ensure the same handover performance in flatter network because the MHP has also utilized the features offered by the hierarchical architecture. This paper extends the MHP to distributed mobile HIP proxy (DMHP). The performance evaluation of the DMHP in comparison to MHP and other similar mobility solutions demonstrates that DMHP does indeed perform well in the flatter networks. Moreover, the DMHP supports both efficient multi-homing and handover management for many mobile hosts at the same time to the same new point of attachment.

Highlights

Cellular network is evolving from a hierarchical to a flatter architecture [1]
We have presented in [3] a preliminary mobility management design of mobile HIP Proxy (MHP)
The preliminary design of MHP we reported in [3] combines mobility function with the Host Identity Protocol (HIP) proxy function

Summary

Introduction

Cellular network is evolving from a hierarchical to a flatter architecture [1]. The nature of a hierarchical architecture can be harnessed to efficiently and seamlessly support host mobility. The proposed distributed mobile HIP proxy (DMHP) enables host mobility in a flat network architecture and addresses problems of handover delay, scalability, single point of failure, packet loss, and signaling overhead. We have presented in [3] a preliminary mobility management design of MHP It provides seamless, secure handovers for both HIP-enabled and non-HIP-enabled mobile hosts without unnecessary signaling overheads to the hosts. The rendezvous server (RVS) [14] with the DNS enables reachability of an HIP host by maintaining a mapping between the host identity, called HIT, and the IP address of the MH This design, called distributed mobile HIP proxy, adds a set of co-located mobility and HIP proxy functions at the access router. When handover of many mobile hosts to the same NPoA occurs (case 2), the N-PoA must respond to and service it as quickly as possible It is inefficient for the N-PoA to send a separate update packet for each MH. One multi-update uses significantly less signals than multiple update packets

Simulation and results

Conclusions