DMAP: integrated mobility and service management in mobile IPv6 systems

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is a work in progress IETF standard for enabling mobility in IPv6 networks and is expected to have wide deployment. We investigate an integrated mobility and service management scheme based on MIPv6 with the goal to minimize the overall network signaling cost in MIPv6 systems for serving mobility and service management related operations. Our design extends IETF work-in-progress Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) with the notion of dynamic mobility anchor points (DMAPs) for each mobile node (MN) instead of static ones for all MNs. These DMAPs are access routers chosen by individual MNs to act as a regional router to reduce the signaling overhead for intra-regional movements. The DMAP domain size, i.e., the number of subnets covered by a DMAP, is based on the MN’s mobility and service characteristics. Under our DMAP protocol, a MN interacts with its home agent and application servers as in the MIPv6 protocol, but optimally determines when and where to launch a DMAP to minimize the network cost in serving the user’s mobility and service management operations. We demonstrate that our DMAP protocol for integrated mobility and service management yields significantly improved performance over basic MIPv6 and HMIPv6.