Distributed Local Mobility Anchor architecture for large scale mobility management

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a deployment strategy to support large scale mobility management based on Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). As a centralized mobility management protocol, PMIPv6 employs a single-handed mobility anchor, Local Mobility Anchor (LMA), to maintain the mobility context and routing status of all registered mobile nodes in a localized domain. However, this single-handed mobility anchor will suffer with ever-increasing mobile Internet traffic. We propose a distributed local mobility anchor architecture with new prefix and address management schemes and then present a mobility management procedure with operational aspects. In the proposed architecture, the registration message is always routed to the closest LMA thanks to the anycast routing. The other LMAs create the direct host route to the serving Mobility Anchor Gateway (MAG) for the optimized packet transmission. We also analyze the proposed architecture's performance in terms of scalability, robustness, and efficiency. The results demonstrate that the state synchronization of the proposed architecture induces extra signaling cost during the handover, however, the optimized route established by it can save more cost when the PMIPv6 service is adopted in the large-scale environment.