Exploiting locality characteristics for reducing signaling load in hierarchical mobile IPv6 networks

Abstract

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) aims to reduce the number of the binding update messages in the backbone networks, and also improve handoff performance. However, this does not imply any change to the periodic binding refresh message to the home agent and the correspondent node, and now a mobile node (MN) additionally should send it to the mobility anchor point (MAP). In addition, the MAP should encapsulate and forward incoming packets to the MN. These facts indicate that the reduction of the number of the binding update messages in the backbone networks can be achieved at the expense of increase of the signaling load within a MAP domain. On the other hand, it is observed that an MN may habitually stay for a relatively long time or spend much time on connecting to the Internet in a specific cell (hereafter, home cell) covering its home, office or laboratory, etc. Thus, when we consider the preceding facts and observation in HMIPv6 networks, HMIPv6 may not be particularly favorable during a home cell residence time in terms of the signaling load; In this case, it may be preferable that the MN uses Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6), not HMIPv6. In this paper, therefore, we presents a new efficient mobility management scheme to enable an MN to selectively switch its mobility management scheme according to whether it is currently in its home cell or not in HMIPv6 networks, which can reduce the signaling load while maintaining the same level of handoff latency as HMIPv6. The numerical results indicate that compared with HMIPv6, the proposed scheme has apparent potential to reduce the signaling load in HMIPv6 networks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.