MCMIPv6: Multicast Configuration-based Mobile IPv6 protocol

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and its basic extension for network mobility NEMO were initially designed to manage the mobility of device users and networks respectively while maintaining a permanent IP address. Nevertheless, the different MIPv6's experiments have shown many lacks in case of high mobility of nodes such as in vehicular networks. To overcome these lacks, many solutions have been proposed by the research community. The most famous ones are HMIPv6 and FMIPv6 tackling each a specific issue. On the one hand, FMIPv6 introduces a solution to effectively minimize the L2/L3 latency and avoid the packets losses during the handover procedure. On the other hand, HMIPv6 is especially efficient in case of local mobility and permits in this case to minimize the signaling cost and improve the latency slightly. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a new vehicular mobility management protocol called MCMIPv6 (Multicast Configuration-based Mobile IPv6 protocol). MCMIPv6 is based on two main ideas: (i) definition of a new packet transmission way in visited networks based on a multicast communication and (ii) proposition of an efficient stateful configuration scheme to obtain addresses in visited networks. We used Qualnet simulator to compare the performances of our protocol, MCMIPv6, to those of existing solutions and show the different performance improvements in terms of handover latency and signaling cost.