A Group-Based Handover Control Scheme for Mobile Internet Using the Partially Distributed Mobility Management (GP-DMM) Protocol

The Distributed Mobility Management protocol (DMM) was defined by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for providing the alternative IP mobility management method. DMM has the characteristic of efficient network deployment capable and efficiency to fit user's demands. In the wireless network, it is possible that a lot of mobile nodes (MNs) may switch from the same previous network to the same new network, i.e., handover, around the same time. However, the currently proposed DMM-based control schemes mainly focus on the handover processing of one MN instead of several MNs. It causes the problem that many duplicate signaling messages are used during handover. In this paper, a Group-based handover control scheme using the partially Distributed Mobility Management (GP-DMM) protocol is proposed to resolve the aforementioned problem. In the proposed GP-DMM scheme, multiple MNs, which move from the same previous network to the same destination around the same time, are formed as one group. In this way, only a set of control messages for handover is used instead of n sets of signaling messages for these n MNs. As a result, when the number of MNs increases, the amount of handover overhead, the handover delay and the packet loss are reduced.