An operational mobility model over IPv6: design,modeling, and evaluation

The fast Internet evolution and rapid development of wireless technologies have made it possible for users to communicate while on the move. Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is a candidate solution for next generation mobile Internet. Despite its popularity, MIPv6 still suffers from various limitations, for example, lack of business model and management of enormous and discrete home agents, preventing it from being deployed in large‐scale commercial environments. Recently, the ID/Locator split architecture has demonstrated its significant predominance in next generation mobile networks. With the aim of pushing the global deployment of mobility support over IPv6, this study makes an effort to design and evaluate an operational mobility model over IPv6 (OMIPv6) based on the ID/Locator split architecture to tackle the problems raised by the current form of MIPv6. In particular, a distributed cloud mobility management system is employed to be responsible for maintaining the identification and locations of mobile hosts, and providing the name resolution services to the mobile hosts. Furthermore, this paper develops an analytical model considering all possible costs required for the operation of OMIPv6, and adopts it as a cost‐effective tool to evaluate various costs and operation overheads on the performance of the OMIPv6 protocol. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.