Cost analysis of mobility entities of hierarchical mobile IPv6

IETF proposed Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) to support host mobility and mobility management involves signaling costs at various mobility entities of the network. Widespread use of IP-enabled mobile devices have resulted in increase in number of mobile users and the signaling cost on underlying mobility entities have increased significantly, which will result in their performance degradation. However, there has been no comprehensive cost analysis of mobility protocol entities that considers all possible costs. In this paper, we have developed analytical models to estimate total costs of key mobility management entities of HMIPv6. We have presented numerical results to demonstrate the impact of network size, mobility rate, traffic rate and data volume on these costs and the percentage overhead on the mobility entities. Our results show that a significant amount of resources are required by the mobility entities for transmission, processing of various signaling messages, as well as searching location database. Our cost analysis will thus be helpful for military applications in estimating actual resource requirements for on-board IP-enabled devices in military vans, tanks, helicopters that require mobility management especially while in operation.