Handover Latency Analysis of Mobility Management Protocols in All-IP Networks

The future generation wireless systems target to provide users with high-speed Internet access and multimedia services besides voice. Mobile IP was developed to provide the freedom of mobility to the users with continuous network access. MIPv6 is the grown up version of Mobile IP and eliminates the problem associated with address space of IPv4 and gives extra bit of inherent security (IPSec). To minimize the high location update traffic induced by the frequent location changes, HMIPv6 was introduced with a new agent node called MAP (Mobility Anchor Point). HMIPv6 classifies mobility into global and local mobility and hence reduces the registration traffic flow into the network. This paper presents simulation based performance evaluation and comparison of mobility management protocols in all-IP Networks. The metric which we have used to compare the performance of mobility management protocol is handover latency. Handover latency is an important factor while transferring the call to new access area. We have analyzed the handover latency of MIPv6 and HMIPv6 protocols as a function of MAP domain size. The numerical results are obtained by simulating pico-cellular environments and graphically shown here. We have shown that HMIPv6 does not always outperforms MIPv6 in terms of handover latency and needs optimization techniques for Movement Detection and DAD procedure to shorten this delay.