Multiple level mobility anchor point selection schemes in HMIPv6

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) has been proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to reduce handoff latency and signaling overhead. In the new protocol, Mobility Anchor Point (MAP) receives all packets in place of Mobile Node (MN) and MAP services are transferred to Care of Address (CoA) of MN. However, a MAP may be a single point of performance bottleneck because the MAP should not only handle signaling traffic but also process data tunneling traffic for all MNs registered in a MAP domain. So, MAPs need MAP management scheme for the multimedia services or real time services. We propose a MAP selection scheme that can select different MAPs according to the traffic characteristics of MNs and a multilevel queue processing method that can process binding updates based on the priorities of queues in a MAP when MNs send BU. Quantitative results of the performance analysis show that our proposal can reduce the location update cost by 31% and the total cost by 14%. With the multilevel queues, we could reduce the total cost by 12% and 17% for D=4 and D=8 respectively.

Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) guarantees to reduce handoff latency, because the MN only registers the new addresses at mobility anchor point (MAP) when the MN moves around access routers (ARs) in the same MAP domain. HMIPv6 still has packet loss problem when the MN moves from one MAP to another. In this paper, a novel location update scheme which further reduces signaling traffic for location update by employing virtual MAP (VMAP) on top of overlapped MAP in HMIPv6, is proposed. This proposed scheme significantly improves performance compared to HMIPv6, in terms of location update rate per user. Also it makes the mobile nodes (MNs) moving around the boundary ARs of adjacent MAP's become to move within a VMAP. It is certain that this scheme reduce the network resources efficiently by reason of removing the location update. In conclusion, this scheme greatly reduces the packet loss and delay, due to Inter-MAP handoff not occurring.

Hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) offers a home agent (HA) route and a route that allows direction communication between the mobile node (MN) and the correspondent node (CN). However, such a direction route is not necessarily desirable because of the possible leakage of the location information relating to the mobile node (MN) and the possible high occurrence of handovers. Therefore, a method of route selection based on the communication conditions of the network is required. This paper proposes a route selection method suitable for the HMIPv6 architecture, in which a route is selected on the basis of a measurement of the packet delay in each possible route. The packet delay used is the round trip time (RTT). This is measured using ping, which is independent of route attributes. This paper also proposes a packet delay estimation algorithm that considers both user movements within the mobility anchor point (MAP) area and those to outside the MAP area. The effectiveness of the algorithm was confirmed through simple experiments with respect to the measurement parts, and mathematical analysis of the processing load of packet delay measurement on the HA

Efficient mobility management involves micro-mobility principles. The performance of a representative micro-mobility approach, hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) protocol, is affected by the manner of mobility anchor point (MAP) selection. In this paper, we propose a new method, based on prediction of the future movement of mobile nodes (MNs). Exploiting the information about the future availability of MAPs, the proposed algorithms choose those MAPs that assure a better service. By means of simulations, we compare the proposed solution to other algorithms. The results show promising improvement in terms of average distance from chosen MAPs and average number of MAP changes. Moreover, we showed that, for perceivable improvement of MAP selection, absolute accuracy of movement prediction is not required.

Though some studies involving general micro-mobility exist, micro-mobility research concerning a mobile node (MN) moving between Mobile Anchor Points (MAP) is lacking. In Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6), a MN sends a binding update (BU) message to a MAP when the MN performs a handoff. This scheme reduces the handoffs and BUs performance costs. However, the total signaling cost of HMIPv6 rapidly increases with the number of corresponding nodes (CN) for a MN moving among MAPs. In this paper, we propose a scheme based on logical topology with autonomous configuration allowing a MN to move around between MAPs without performing a BU. We perform the performance evaluation for packet delivery and location update costs through a novel analytic approach. We show that the proposed scheme is approximately two times better than the existing one in terms of the total signaling costs through performance analysis. Furthermore, our scheme also reduces the location management cost effectively.

Fast handover protocol provides seamless handover in mobile IPv6 networks by reducing handover latency. One assumption in fast handover is that the MN (Mobile Node) or the network could know or predict the new AR (Access Router) before data transport from the previous AR to the MN is disrupted. In order to achieve this capability, the complexity of predicting the new AR and the diversity of the wireless link technologies should be considered. While it is difficult to know or predict the new AR exactly, a better solution is required to find a reasonable set of candidate ARs (i.e., neighbor ARs) that are likely to be the new AR after a handover. This paper introduces a solution to support a fast handover mechanism using multi-tunnels between MAP (Mobility Anchor Point) and neighbor ARs in HMIPv6 (Hierarchical Mobile IPv6) network. It includes the concepts of Proxy Mobile IP for creation of CoA (Care of Address) and DAD (Duplicate Address Detection). In this protocol, the MN can handover without receiving any information about the new AR and this eliminates difficulties to know or predict exactly the new AR which is not specified in standard fast handover scheme. It decouples layer-2 and layer-3 handover and efficiently reduces handover latency through the minimized number of wireless signaling messages and pre-DAD. It also saves periods of service disruption and prevents packet loss in the case of ping-pong movement of the high-speed MN. The performance of the proposed mechanism is evaluated by simulations under variable conditions.

The current deployment of wireless mesh networks requires mobility management to track the current locations of mobile nodes around the network without service interruption. To do so, the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 protocol has been chosen, which minimises the required signalling by introducing a new entity called the mobile anchor point to act as a local home agent for all visiting mobile nodes in a specific domain. It allows a mobile node to register its local/regional care-of addresses with a mobile anchor point by sending a local binding update message. However, the local binding update is quite sensitive; it modifies the routing to enable mobility in the wireless mesh networks. When a local binding update message is spoofed, an attacker can redirect traffic that is destined for legitimate mobile node either to itself or to another node. This situation leads to an increased risk of attacks. Therefore, this paper contributes to addressing this security issue based on wireless mesh networks by cryptography generation and verification of a mobile node’s local and regional care-of addresses, as well as the application of a novel method to verify the reachability of mobile node at claimed local care-of address. This is called the enhanced mobile anchor point registration protocol. The Scyther tool has been used to ensure the proposed protocol accuracy. Furthermore, the performance, in terms of the mobile anchor point registration delay and signalling overhead, is evaluated by using the OPNET modeller simulator.

In the mobile Internet, a handover brings significant performance degradation of TCP due to bursty packet losses during handover processing. In this paper, we propose a new bandwidth control for improving the TCP performance. In the proposed system, when a mobile node changes its accessing base station, an intermediate router suppresses an available bandwidth to the corresponding TCP flow. Because suppressing the bandwidth results in reducing mis-forwarded packets to the old base station, the bursty packet losses can be avoided. In the hierarchical mobile network structure, which is recently developed in order to realize micro-mobility protocol, all packets transferred to mobile nodes are converged to several gateways such as mobility anchor points (MAP) in hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6). Therefore, the proposed system is suited to the hierarchical structure because it can be easily implemented at such gateways. Computer simulation results show that the proposed system can improve the TCP performance degradation especially in a situation where handovers frequently occur.

We present a new method to improve the bandwidth of HMIPv6 networks called HMIPv6-BI. This approach proposes a modification to the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 protocol. The goal of HMIPv6-BI is to minimize the Bandwidth usage of the Radio Link between the Access Router (AR) and the Mobile Node (MN). Currently, in HMIPv6 a tunnel is established between the Mobility Anchor Point (MAP) and the MN. By contrast, the principle used by HMIPv6-BI is to move the Tunnel End Point until the AR. In consequence, this method decreases the number of bytes traveling over the wireless interface due to the absence of the tunnel headers required in the original approach. Furthermore, HMIPv6-BI allows the usage of Multicast Tunnel (this approach is named TMCast+HMIPv6-BI) in order to reduce the Handover Latency. Finally, modeling and simulation results indicate that HMIPv6-BI provides better performance as compared to the standard approach.

Mobility management is a key issue to achieve uninterrupted Internet services in IP based network. In IPv6, the mobility management is realized by its mobile version namely the Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). The MIPv6 is further extended to Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) to reduce handoff latency suffered by mobile nodes and signaling load incurred due to movement if nodes within the micro mobility region defined by HMIPv6. The HMIPv6 is considered as first widely accepted layered architecture for mobility management for IPv6 network. Influenced by the benefits of HMIPv6, many researchers have suggested extension of MIPv6 into multiple layers. However, there is very little work on finding optimal levels of hierarchy in such layered architecture. The focus of this paper is to evaluate the performance of a multilayer (N-layered with N as 5) MIPv6 architecture through experimental testbed. We have observed handoff latency, signaling overhead and tunneling cost and figured out the optimal levels of hierarchy that provides the best acceptable results for all the observed parameters. Since, HMIPv6 outperforms MIPv6 in terms of handoff latency and signaling cost, so we compare our results with HMIPv6. Testbed observation depicts that three levels of hierarchy in MIPv6 architecture provides optimal performance with 27 % reduction in handoff latency and 67 % reduction in signaling overhead compared to single layer architecture like Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) protocol.

This paper proposes a new mechanism of multiple home agents to realize a stable connection in Mobile IPv6. The new mechanism has multiple home agents instead of only one home agent in the existing specification of Mobile IPv6. In the existing Mobile IPv6 protocol, it takes time to find a new home agent and make it work. A mobile node cannot find that the home agent is down until the mobile node needs to register or update the binding information at the home agent. When a home agent is down and a mobile node is away from home and on a foreign link, the mobile node cannot receive any packets from a newly joining correspondent node. The new mechanism provides multiple home agents with a new binding update message and a new ICMP home agent unreachable error message. The new binding update procedure realizes a fast home agent recovery. This paper describes the result of an experiment which shows how a mobile node works with multiple home agents. We also compare the fast home agent recovery process with existing methods.

Mobile IPv6 is a key technology in IPv6 to support the mobility of wireless communication terminals. In mobile IPv6, home agents (HAs) are responsible for the registration of mobile nodes (MNs) in the home network, and tunneling the data packets to the MNs when the MNs are not reachable through its home IP addresses. However recent research shows that the traffic bottleneck could be formed at a HA. When the HA experiences high intensity of the tunneled traffic and the MH registration information. In this paper, we propose a hybrid load balance mechanism which takes account of not only the MN registration information but also the tunneled data traffic information to effectively release and prevent the formation of the traffic bottleneck at the HA. We show that the proposed mechanism can be implemented in mobile IPv6 without changing the protocols of the communication between HAs and MNs in IETF MIPv6 draft. Simulation shows that our proposed algorithm can reduce the traffic delay substantially and the buffer requirements during the tunneling traffic phase in mobile IPv6.

Internet engineering task force (IETF) has proposed hierarchical mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) in order to reduce a frequent location registration of a mobile node in mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). All traffics toward a mobile node must be transmitted through a MAP in HMIPv6. This brings unnecessary packet latency because of the increased processing cost of packet at the MAP. At this point, the processing cost of packet at the MAP is influenced by the packet arrival rate for a mobile node, cell mobility rate and the number of mobile nodes in MAP domain. In this paper, we analyze the MAP's performance considering the above elements. For this, we compare total cost of HMIPv6 with total cost of MIPv6 as MAP's capability after we define Markov chain model for performance analysis. Also, we define network's total profit as total cost of MIPv6 minus total cost of HMIPv6. Then, we can find optimal capability of MAP such that total profit has maximum value. Also, we use the blocking probability by the MAP's capability as performance estimation element. As a conclusion, we can-observe both HMIPv6's performance by the MAP's capability and optimal capability of the MAP, and blocking probability form a relationship of trade off between them.

While the IETF standardization process of the Mobile IPv6 and Network Mobility (NEMO) protocols is almost complete, their large-scale deployment is not yet possible. With these technologies, in order to hide location changes of the mobile nodes from the rest of the Internet, a specific router called a home agent is used. However, this equipment generates resilience and performance issues such as protocol scalability and longer paths. In order to solve these problems, we describe and analyze a new concept called Home Agent Migration. The main feature of this solution is the distribution of home agents inside the current Internet topology to reduce distances to end-nodes. As is usually done for anycast routing, they advertise the same network prefix from different locations; moreover they also exchange information about their associations with mobile nodes. This produces a Global Mobile eXchange (GMX), an overlay network that efficiently handles data traffic from and to mobile nodes, and operates home agents as would an Internet eXchange Point (IXP). When a correspondent node needs to exchange packets with a mobile node, the data traffic will be intercepted by its closest GMX home agent and redirected to the home agent to which the mobile node is bound.

Home Agents (HA) represent a single point of failure for Mobile IPv6-based networks. To overcome this problem many solutions have been published providing reliable HA architectures. These solutions require deploying redundant HAs on each sub-network. Although these solutions effectively mitigate this problem, they do not take into account the requirements of large networks with dozens of sub-networks. Deploying several HAs on each sub-network may be too expensive to deploy and to manage. In this paper we present a novel HA architecture that only requires a set of HAs for the whole network. Our basic idea is that the Mobile Node's location can be announced to exit routers, this way re-directing packets can be done without involving the HA. Our solution provides reliability and load balancing as the existing solutions. Finally, we validate our proposal through an analytical model and compare it against other proposals through a simulation.