Distributed mobility control in proxy mobile IPv6 networks

In future mobile networks, the ever-increasing loads imposed by mobile Internet traffic will force the network architecture to be changed from hierarchical to flat structure. Most of the existing mobility protocols are based on a centralized mobility anchor, which will process all control and data traffic. In the flat network architecture, however, the centralized mobility scheme has some limitations, such as unwanted traffic flowing into the core network, service degradation by a single point of failure, and increased operational costs, etc. This paper proposes mobility schemes for distributed mobility control in the flat network architecture. Based on the Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIP), which is a well-known mobility protocol, we propose the three mobility schemes: Signal-driven PMIP (S-PMIP), Data-driven Distributed PMIP (DD-PMIP), and Signal-driven Distributed PMIP (SD-PMIP). By numerical analysis, we show that the proposed distributed mobility schemes can give better performance than the existing centralized scheme in terms of the binding update and packet delivery costs, and that SD-PMIP provides the best performance among the proposed distributed schemes.