DMM-based inter-domain mobility support for proxy mobile IPv6

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) takes advantage of the network-based mobility management that provides mobility support for moving nodes (MNs) without their involvement. However, the main drawback of PMIPv6 is that the inter-domain handover is not supported. That means when an MN moves to another PMIPv6 domain, the on-going sessions cannot be maintained. Although several proposals have been introduced for the inter-domain mobility support, they still have some limitations such as sub-optimal routing, signaling overhead, handover latency and lack of granularity on the mobility management service. In this paper, we propose the inter-domain mobility solutions based on the concept of the distributed mobility management (DMM) to overcome these limitations. Basically, DMM brings the mobility anchors closer to the users, thus avoiding such issues as sub-optimal routing, signaling overhead and dynamically providing the mobility service. Using the DMM concept, we have considered two approaches: partially or fully distributed. A performance analysis is studied based on a well-known factor, namely a session-to-mobility ratio which represents the relative ratio of session arrival rate to the user mobility rate. Numerical results show that the partially distributed solution gives a better performance than the existing inter-domain handover solutions (e.g. integration of MIPv6 and PMIPv6) in terms of handover latency, signaling cost and tunnel usage.