An analytical approach to the performance evaluation of mobility protocols: the handoff delay case

Under few assumptions (random walk mobility model, transmission cost proportional to distance, minimum distance routing), this paper describes closed form expressions to quantify the handoff delay of two mobility mechanisms, the home agent-based and the binding update-based ones. This allows us to estimate the performance of different protocols, choose under what conditions each protocol performs best and better tune the protocol parameters to increase performance. The comparative analysis here proposed allows us to quantify the benefits and tradeoffs of each of the approaches and take appropriate decisions when different mobility protocols are at our choice. This is an important result in many applications, as it gives a first order approximation on whether to use the home agent option or route optimization option in MIPv6 as a function of the distance of the mobile entities. Although we have focused in this paper basically on two mobility managements mechanisms, the analysis is easily extensible to other approaches.