A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating IPv6 Based Mobility Management Protocols

Seamless mobility in future generation networks, which are envisioned to be heterogeneous in nature, is an important issue. While Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) work groups have standardized various mobility management protocols, such as Mobile IPv6 and Proxy Mobile IPv6, a comprehensive study of these protocols in terms of various performance characteristics is a challenging issue. Moreover, this study also considers the recent proposals from IETF in distributed mobility management (DMM) protocols. In this paper, a novel analytical model is developed for comparison of various mobility management protocols in terms of handover latency, as well as packet density, and packet arrival rate during the handover time by applying transport engineering principles in the field of telecommunication. The signaling cost analysis using signaling overhead incurred during protocol operations is given for each of these protocols. The number of packets that can be lost during the handover operation is also obtained using this model. Moreover, it presents a unified framework using which one can assess the performance characteristics of both host based and network based mobile IP protocols. One can also assess the performance of centralized and DMM approaches. The correctness of the proposed model is established by the fact that it leads to results similar to those obtained by applying some of the existing models. At the same time, the model allows one to obtain additional results showing the effect of packet density and packet arrival rate on the handover latency.