A Comprehensive Analysis of Mobility Management in MPLS-Based Wireless Access Networks

Efficient mobility management is one of the major challenges for next-generation mobile systems. Indeed, a mobile node (MN) within an access network may cause excessive signaling traffic and service disruption due to frequent handoffs. The two latter effects need to be minimized to support quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of emerging multimedia applications. In this perspective, we propose in this paper a new mobility management scheme designed to track host mobility efficiently so as to minimize both handoff latency and signaling cost. Building on and enhancing mobile IP and taking advantage of MPLS traffic engineering capability, three mechanisms (FH-, FC- and MFC-micro mobile MPLS) are introduced. In order to assess the efficiency of our proposals, all protocols are compared. To achieve this, we develop analytical models to evaluate the signaling cost and link usage for both two-dimensional and one-dimensional mobility models. Additional mathematical models are also provided to derive handoff latency and packet loss rate. Numerical and simulation results show that the proposed mechanisms can significantly reduce the registration updates cost and provide low handoff latency and packet loss rate under various scenarios.