State-Aware Pointer Forwarding Scheme With Fast Handover Support in a PMIPv6 Domain

Proxy mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) has been developed as a network-based mobility management protocol by the Internet Engineering Task Force. Mobility for individual mobile nodes (MNs) is supported by network entities. PMIPv6 thus eliminates mobility signaling from the MNs as it does not require a mobility stack at the MNs. However, during handovers of MNs, PMIPv6 induces unnecessary location update traffic and suffers the packet loss, which downgrades the quality of mobility support. In this paper, we introduce a state-aware pointer forwarding scheme with fast handover support, called FC-PMIPv6, to further enhance the performance of mobility support in a PMIPv6 domain. In FC-PMIPv6, a pointer forwarding chain between mobility access gateways (MAGs) is established to reduce location update traffic to a local mobility anchor during handovers of an MN. The current mobility state of the MN is also considered in deciding whether the forwarding chain should be prolonged or refreshed by an MAG serving the MN. This mobility state consideration in pointer forwarding reduces unnecessary traffic for the location update and guarantees the efficiency of packet transmission. In addition, a fast handover process is adopted to reduce the handover latency and avoid the packet loss during handovers. We develop analytical models to study the performance of FC-PMIPv6, which consider both the signaling cost and the packet transmission cost. Numerical results not only demonstrate that FC-PMIPv6 outperforms the basic PMIPv6 protocol, but also present a relationship between an optimized length of a forwarding chain and a mobility state of an MN. From the conducted numerical results, for example, it is shown that the signaling cost of FC-PMIPv6 is enhanced up to 23% over the basic PMIPv6 protocol. In addition, simulation results on the weighted signaling cost are provided to demonstrate the performance improvement of our FC-PMIPv6 compared with the basic PMIPv6 protocol.