Distributed mobility management based on flat network architecture

Mobility management is crucial for mobile networks to support certain quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper, we developed a flat network architecture rather than traditional two-layer mobility management architecture to reduce network elements and lighten networking load. Based on the proposed flat network structure the concept of separation of location and identity (Loc/ID), which comes from “clean-slate” design idea, was used in the mobility management scheme. To maximally reduce the handoff latency, bicasting mechanism was adopted and the consumption of bicasting was limited locally rather than globally. As analyzed in this paper, the bicasting scheme forms a lower bound for handoff latency in single network interface configuration case. To evaluate the performance of the proposed mobility management system analytical model was established by which the signaling cost, handoff delay and packet loss were evaluated. Compared with other fast handoff approach, we showed that our handoff approach is better in terms of signaling cost, handoff latency and bicasting cost.