Distance-based localized mobile IP mobility management

As a mobility management extension of basic mobile IP, localized mobility management (LMM) has been proposed for supporting local registrations of mobile nodes. The existing LMM protocols may suffer from high signaling traffic and long service delay caused by that a single and central gateway foreign agent (GFA) services all registrations and packet deliveries for mobile nodes roaming within a local network (i.e., domain). This paper introduces two distributed LMM methods to distribute the functions of the central GFA into other foreign agents. One is the distance-based distributed LMM method, which allows all routers to configure their own networks consisting of several routers within a distance from themselves. Each router acts as the temporary GFA on its domain while the central GFA still exists. Another is the distance-based fully distributed LMM method, in which there is not the central GFA in a domain while all routers can act as GFAs. We present the specifications and basic protocol operations of both distributed LMM methods for the system implementation. Performance evaluation and comparison are conducted by comprehensive simulation. It shows clearly trade-off and the performance gain by the proposed distributed LMM methods. These results may be useful for the design and implementation of the mobile Internet.