A hierarchical mobility management scheme for IPv6

As the number of portable devices roaming across the Internet increases, the problem of routing packets to mobile hosts generates increasing research and commercial interest. This paper presents a hierarchical scheme to support mobility in the Internet. This scheme is based on the multicast routing protocol PIM-SM. In this proposal, a mobile node is seen by its correspondent nodes as a special multicast group. Packets destined for a mobile host are delivered to its RP (rendezvous point) and then forwarded to the mobile node's current location. Our scheme has two main benefits. First, it is hierarchical and therefore reduces handoff latency and the load on the Internet. Second, it uses IP multicast and consequently benefits from its diffusion property, which can be very useful for providing smooth subnet handoffs. We compare the performance of our approach with the IETF Mobile IPv6 proposal. We show that while our approach has a larger memory space requirement, it reduces the network load, provides smoother and faster subnet handoffs and frees the mobile hosts from mobility support procedures.