A mobility management model based on users’ mobility profiles for IPv6 networks

Fourth-generation (4G) mobile systems provide access to a wide range of services and enable mobile users to communicate regardless of their geographical location and their roaming characteristics. Due to the growing number of mobile users, global connectivity, and the small size of cells, one of the most critical issues pertaining to these networks is location management. In recent years, several strategies have been proposed to improve the performance of the location management procedure in 3G and 4G mobile networks. In this paper, we propose a new model called Seamless Mobile IPv6 (SMIPv6) to improve the performance of the handover component in location management schemes. This model improves handover by predicting user location based on Users’ Mobility Profiles. The overall goals of SMIPv6 are to reduce both handover latency and signaling loads generated during the location update process. Simulation results show that the use of SMIPv6 produces a handover with low delay, as well as a significant drop of signaling overhead. Better results have been obtained by our protocol in all cases studied when compared to Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) and Fast Handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6).