Performance analysis of mobility management protocols using a generic mathematical model

Abstract

An important challenge for All-IP wireless networks is the development of solutions for fast and seamless mobility. Many mobility management protocols have been developed to match real-time requirements in All-IP networks. In addition, lots of performance studies have been performed. In order to estimate the performance of a certain mobility management protocol compared to some others, a mathematical model for each protocol should be developed or each protocol should be simulated or implemented. In general, the simulation and the implementation take a long time and deliver detailed and accurate results. The mathematical model can be developed faster and results in a good estimation of the performance. Until now there is no generic mathematical model that can be used for a wide range of mobility management solutions. In this paper we propose a model that allows for the evaluation of the performance of a large set of mobility management protocols with respect to the handoff latency and the expected number of dropped packets. Our model takes the dropping of control messages, mobility patterns and network topology into account. The parameters of the generic model are set according to the characteristics of the studied protocols. Mobile IP Fast Authentication protocol (MIFA) and Handoff-Aware Wireless Access Internet Infrastructure (HAWAII) are compared to each other in this paper using the developed model.