Implementation and analysis of network-based mobility management protocol in WLAN environments

Abstract

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) has been approved by the IETF as the standardized solution for mobility management in IPv6 network. MIPv6 is a host-based mobility support specification, and it can provide the global mobility support for mobile terminal. However, MIPv6 handover procedure results in a long handover delay. To improve the handover performance, some MIPv6 variants such as Fast Handover for MIPv6 (FMIPv6) and Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) were proposed. However, they all require the mobile terminal to support the mobility management protocols. Recently, the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) was proposed in IETF NETLMM workgroup, which is a network-based localized mobility management and it can provide the mobility support for mobile node without an involvement in the mobility signaling. The previous work about the performance evaluation of PMIPv6 is mainly based on the analysis and lacks of evaluation in a real system. So, in this paper, we study the PMIPv6 and implement it in the WLAN environments. We set up a test-bed to evaluate its performance and compare it with the other mobility specifications including the MIPv6, FMIPv6 and HMIPv6. The results show that the PMIPv6 can improve the handover performance under low-delay networks, as for the wide are networks, it needs to introduce some mechanism like fast handover needs to further improve its performance.