Research On Mobility Management For Mobile IPv6

Mobile IP (MIP) is a solution at the network layer to support mobile nodes (MNs) moving in the Internet, which enables an MN with a fixed IP address to keep its connection to the network and other nodes when the MN moves among different networks. MIP is a key technology for an MN's global roaming.Mobility management, which plays an important role in Mobile IP networks, consists of two related components: handoff management and location management. The former aims to keep communications undisrupted between the network and the MNs in moving, while the latter enables the network to quickly locate the current access points of the MNs in order to deliver data packets to them. The controlling messages resulted from location management consumes a lot of networks' resources including bandwidth, power and more. Therefore it is very important that optimized location management strategies are developed to efficiently reduce the signaling cost in mobility management.The Hierarchical Mobile IP (HMIP), proposed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), is a well-known protocol to reduce signaling cost for location management in Mobile IP networks. Based on true HMIP, we developped a paging-supported HMIPv6 in this paper so that the power consumed by mobile nodes as well as signaling traffic can be considerably reduced. Sequential paging schemes under both unlimited and limited paging delay are studied. In addition, two genetic algorithm (GA) based sequential paging schemes are proposed respectively, in which all the subnets in a paging area are partitioned into groups by a GA making use of location probabilities of MNs, and then each group is paged in one paging step. Further, the signaling costs of HMIPv6, the HMIPv6 with single-step paging, and the two schemes are compared. Moreover, the prerequisite conditions for decreasing signaling cost under single or sequential paging are given. Besides, numeric results are presented to show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed schemes. The results given in this paper are useful both in theory and practice for advancing mobile IP technology.