TE-DMM: A Proposal to Improve the Control Plane in PMIPv6-based DMM Networks

With the continuous development of mobile communications over the past few years, the achievement of an efficient IP mobility management has revealed as one of the major challenges in next-generation wireless networks. For this reason, the Internet Engineering Task Force developed various centralized mobility protocols where all intelligence is concentrated in one end-point system. However, centralized mobility solutions are prone to several problems such as signaling overhead or scalability issues, among others. In order to overcome these limitations, a new approach, called Distributed Mobility Management (DMM), is currently being considered. In this paper, an analytical cost model and experimental evaluation are developed for evaluating the performance of the DMM implementations. Furthermore, a new approach called Tunneling Extension to Distributed Mobility Management (TE-DMM) is described. TE-DMM proposes a modification to the distributed existing solutions in order to reduce the signaling overhead and consequently improve the control plane. Experimental results have been obtained from a real testbed in which TE-DMM has been implemented. Both the analytical evaluation and the experimental results show that our distributed solution optimizes the signaling processing as well as the packet loss during handovers.