Hybrid Distributed Mobility Management for next-generation wireless networks

One of key challenges for emerging and future wireless networks will be the support of seamless distributed IP mobility management to support a plethora of different applications. In this paper, an optimization problem for provisioning efficient centralized Mobility Agents (MAs) deployment is formulated, as well as a realistic model is developed for the Distributed Mobility Management (DMM) scheme. These are subsequently compared in terms of various key characteristics, such as routing cost, delay and topology dependence. Then, an innovative Hybrid Distributed Mobility Management (HDMM) scheme is presented that provides improved network performance in terms of handover support for delay sensitive flows, compared to fully DMM schemes, which their performance can be strongly topology-dependent. The proposed scheme combines the centralized and distributed mobility support, depending on the network's topology characteristics. A wide set of numerical investigations reveal the advantages of the DMM scheme over the centralized scheme for different network cases and detail the reasons why future networks tend to decentralize mobility management functionalities. Simulation results, also, show that the proposed HDMM scheme can significantly improve the network's performance and the achieved QoS of the end-users, allowing seamless mobility support for delay intolerant over-the-top services (e.g. VoIP).