A Hierarchical Approach to Handle Inter-domain Mobility in SDN-based Networks using Mobile IP

Mobility management has become crucial in highly dynamic environments. As mobility traffic grows, handover rates between cells and different technologies increase. Handover has been studied extensively in order to enhance mobile users' perceived services. Mobile IP (MIP) is a standard protocol that handles handover efficiently in conventional networking. Recently, as Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm steps in, its impact on mobile networks has been studied, and it indeed benefits mobility management. To exploit the advantages of SDN and MIP, a merge of them is needed, which requires the modification of MIP. In this paper, we study a modified version of MIP protocol in a hierarchical architecture, taking into consideration metrics such as delay, packet loss, and throughput. We show that a hierarchical setting betters handling handover between heterogeneous networks. Our algorithm's performance shows improvement in decreasing total delay if the hierarchical architecture is applied compared to a distributed architecture.