Analysis of Location Management Schemes in Mobile IPv6

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is a generally accepted mobility management protocol to support user mobility in IP networks, which use registration mechanism to maintain location information of mobile nodes. However, MIPv6 can not satisfy requirements of seamless mobility, such as signaling traffic, handoff delay and packet loss rate. Accordingly, there are two typical location management extensions to MIPv6: hierarchical location management and IP paging. Four related location management schemes are considered, MIPv6, Paging extension for MIPv6, Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) and Paging extension on HMIPv6. Then, the signaling cost of these schemes is analyzed through theoretical modeling. We analyze impacts of network environment parameters, such as domain size and mobile nodes speed, to the signaling cost and compare the performance of these schemes. The analysis result shows that the MIPv6 extended schemes can provide more scalable and efficient location tracking mechanism and reduce signaling overhead significantly, but the HMIPv6-P does not remarkably outperform P-MIPv6 and HMIPv6 as expected.