A Performance Evaluation of IP Mobility Support Protocols

At present, the number of Internet subscribers accessing Internet through mobility terminal equipment and other new types is gradually increasing, which shows it's important to develop mobility management protocols in order to provide mobility support for the subscribers. Several protocols were proposed to support IP mobility in the IETF, such as MIPv6, HMIPv6, FMIPv6 and F-HMIPv6. Some performance analyses of the protocols have been made before, most of which are about the handover and signal load, etc. However, there is lack of performance evaluation from perspective of application. In this paper, we analyze and compare the handover latency and packet transmission delay of the real time application, and also the average throughput of the non-real time application with the four IP Mobility protocols. The simulation results show that with real time application, F-HMIPv6 has the least handover latency, and the four protocols have almost the same packet transmission delay. With the non-real time application, F-HMIPv6 has the largest throughput, followed by FMIPv6 and the other protocols.