A Distributed Network Mobility Management Scheme for Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 Networks

Route optimization for network mobility is a key technique for providing a node in a mobile network (Mobile Network Node or MNN) with high quality broadband communications. Many schemes adding route optimization function to Network Mobility (NEMO) Basic Support protocol, the standardized network mobility management protocol from the IETF nemo working group, have already been proposed in recent years. One such scheme, a scheme using Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 (HMIPv6) aims to overcome micromobility management issues as well by applying a mechanism based on HMIPv6. The traditional scheme, however, suffers from a significant number of signaling messages as the number of MNNs and/or the number of their Correspondent Nodes (CNs) increase, because many messages notifying the MNNs' Home Agents (HAMNNs) and the CNs of the mobile network's movement are generated simultaneously each time the mobile network moves to the domain of another micromobility management router (Mobility Anchor Point or MAP). This paper proposes a scheme to overcome this problem. Our scheme reduces the number of signaling messages generated at the same time by managing the mobility of MNNs using multiple MAPs distributed within a network for load sharing. The results of simulation experiments show that our scheme works efficiently compared to the traditional scheme when a mobile network has many MNNs and/or these MNNs communicate with many CNs.