Evaluating the Benefits of Introducing PMIPv6 for Localized Mobility Management

Since recent years, it has been recognized that using global mobility protocol for managing localized mobility causes a number of problems, such as a long registration delay. To overcome these problems, proxy mobile IPv6 is proposed, which can avoid tunneling overhead over the air and support for hosts without an involvement in the mobility management. In this paper, we first discuss the recent localized mobility proposals and explore three major benefits that PMIPv6 can bring. In particular, we evaluate two aspects of the handover performance through a simple mathematical model for fast handovers for MIPv6, hierarchical MIPv6, fast handovers for HMIPv6 and PMIPv6. These analytical studies show that PMIPv6 may cause high handover latency if the local mobility anchor is located far from the current mobility access gateway. Therefore, some enhancements for PMIPv6 are suggested to further reduce the handover latency. The analysis ascertains that F-PMIPv6 is a promising mobility scheme to efficiently manage the localized mobility.