Performance analysis of Virtual Mobility Domain scheme vs. IPv6 mobility protocols

The population of mobile users seeking connectivity to the Internet has been growing over the years, spurred by the capabilities of handsets and the increasing rich Internet content and services. Mobility management to enable efficient Internet access for users on the move is thus gaining significance. IETF has standardized several protocols such as Mobile IPv6, Hierarchical Mobile IPv6, and Proxy Mobile IPv6 to provide mobility management on the IP network. With future Internet design initiatives gaining momentum, it is important that these initiatives consider mobility management as an integral part of the design. In this article, we introduce the concept of Virtual Mobility Domain and describe the main features and key strengths of Virtual Mobility Domain that are designed to provide mobility management in a newly proposed tiered Internet architecture. Instead of IP addressing, the proposed Virtual Mobility Domain uses a tiered-addressing scheme to identify a mobile node with a single address regardless of its location. The tiered addressing provides a dynamic address length which brings less signaling overhead and scalable management. We also propose a collaborative network-based mobility management mechanism to provide low-latency handoffs and less processing-overhead on the mobile node compared to the IPv6-based protocols. The proposed mobility scheme unifies inter and intra-domain mobility management by introducing common anchor cloud concept which provides a distributed management and seamless mobility experience. We present comparative qualitative and quantitative performance analysis of Virtual Mobility Domain and aforementioned IPv6-based mobility protocols for Intra-AS roaming support. We examine handoff latency and signaling overhead performance of each protocol based on numerical results retrieved from analytical models and OPNET modeler based simulations. The results from a comparative performance study show the potential for more efficient mobility management under the proposed Internet architecture.