Mobility Management in Identifier/Locator Split Networks

Abstract

In the traditional Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) stack, IP address represents not only the identifier but also the location of a node so that it can not provide global roaming seamless. To address this problem, MIP (Mobile IP) uses dynamical care-of-address to indicate the location of a mobile node (MN) and stable home address to indicate its identifier. However, such a separation of MIP can not support routing scalability, location privacy, and manageability. In this paper, we propose an identifier/locator split architecture which contains an overlay mapping system to store identifier-to-locator mappings and manage mobile nodes' behavior. In addition, we design a novel mobility management scheme based on the identifier/locator split architecture (MMILS) which can address the above issues of MIP. To reduce the amount of signaling and enhance the performance, we distinguish micro-mobility and macro-mobility by introducing an Agent Tunnel Router (ATR). For micro-mobility, the ATR keeps the MN's identifier-to-locator mapping invariable, so it avoids the mapping update in the mapping system and the Tunnel Route (TR) of each correspondent node. For macro-mobility, to support fast update and handover, we design a united mapping table in the ATR. And then, we estimate the number of entries and the required storage space to validate it feasible. To evaluate the efficiency of MMILS, we analyze the signaling cost by establishing an analytical model and implement it in our test-bed. The results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce signaling traffic and has a low handover delay compared to MIP and HMIP (Hierarchical Mobile IP).