Virtual Agent Clustering Based Mobility Management Over the Satellite Networks

Abstract

Due to the high dynamic characteristics of the low-orbit satellite networks, the frequent handovers of the users led to heavy mobility management load and large handover delay. To solve these problems, one mobility management mechanism based on the virtual agent domain (VAD) is proposed. In this mechanism, a virtual agent cluster (VAC) is designed to co-manage the network architecture of users in the corresponding VAD. With the on-board processing and switching capabilities, the architecture of the distributed mobility management mechanism is adopted to support the information sharing between the VACs, which reduces the performance requirements for single satellite and improves the system scalability. Then, we construct the home mobile-agent-anchor (HMAA) and the local MAA. In this way, the MN triggers a binding update to the HA only when the home MAA is lost, and the MN's switching within the VAD only needs to update its intra-domain relations, which reduces the overhead of mobility management and switching delay. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is theoretically evaluated in terms of the signaling overhead and handover latency. Finally, the numerical simulation results are presented to verify the efficacy of our scheme. The experimental platform also demonstrates the availability and efficiency of the new mechanism.