Comparative Study and Performance Analysis of the Macro-mobility Protocol

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) describes how mobile node can change its point of attachment from one access router to another. The handover performance of mobile IPv6 is one of the key factors which guarantee the QoS of mobile Internet.Mobility management issues are solved by separating macro mobility(inter-domain) generally using Mobile IP and micro mobility(intra-domain). In recent years, many enhancements for macro-mobility protocols have been proposed, designed and implemented in Mobile IPv6. Hierarchical Mobile IPv6(HMIPv6) is one of them that is designed to reduce the amount of signaling required and to improve handover speed for mobile connections. This paper presents a comparative study of the Hierarchical Mobility IPv6 and Mobile IPv6 protocols.The architecture and operation of each protocol is studied and are evaluated based on the Quality of Service (QoS) parameter:handover latency. The simulation was carried out by using the Network Simulator-2. The simulation results show that,HMIPv6 performs best under macro-domain mobility compared to MIPv6. The MIPv6 suffers large handover latency.