Distributed Mobility Management: Approaches and analysis

IP mobility management has a key role in wireless networking and mobile Internet. The existing IP mobility protocols are deployed generally in a centralized manner. All the data traffic passes through a centralized entity and all the bindings are managed at this entity as well. As the number of mobile users and the volume of their traffic increase, such centralized architectures may encounter scalability and performance issues. In order to cope with the rapid increase in mobile Internet traffic, various efforts from both industry and academia are being performed recently on specifying Distributed Mobility Management (DMM). DMM is expected to eliminate the limitations of current mobility protocols. In this paper, we present different DMM approaches based on MIPv6 and PMIPv6, providing global and/or local mobility support. Then, we carry out a qualitative and quantitative analyses. The analyses conclude the strong and weak points of the different approaches, comparing them with existing protocols. Both analyses encourage towards DMM as a promising scheme.