A Hierarchical Network Design Solution for Mobile IPv6

Over the past years a number of IP micro-mobility protocols have been proposed as an extension or complement of Mobile IP. Although the development of these protocols has generated considerable interest in industry and academia, none of them have been widely deployed. The main reason of this lack of real-life usage of micro-mobility proposals is that the RFCs or drafts of these protocols do not address the problems regarding the realization of the micromobility structures in detail during the procedures of network design. This shortage is true in case of Hierarchical Mobile IP as well (RFC 4140), which is one of the most significant micro-mobility solutions aiming to reduce the signaling delay and the number of signaling messages of Mobile IP. In order to provide guidelines for network designers we propose a new a hierarchical network design algorithm (HIENDA) based on the structure given by a Location Area planning algorithm, aligned with a MAP allocation algorithm in Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 to optimize the mobility management in Mobil IP networks. HIENDA considers the topology constraints, and takes the available mobility pattern and Access Router handover rate information as input, and finds a near optimal hierarchical structure for which the total signaling cost will be minimal. From the simulation results the conclusion could be drawn that HIENDA outperforms the other existing hierarchy optimizing solutions in the term of Location Update Cost, at the same time keeping the Packet Delivery Cost on a low level.