An Adaptive Network Mobility Support Protocol in Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 Networks

The network mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol provides collective mobility for a group of nodes in vehicular area networks. Since the NEMO basic support protocol always performs the same operations, regardless of a mobile network´s characteristics, it cannot achieve optimal performance. We propose an adaptive NEMO support protocol based on hierarchical mobile IPv6. The proposed protocol jointly optimizes binding update (BU) traffic and tunneling overhead by employing the adaptive BU strategy, depending on the session-to-mobility ratio (SMR). Specifically, both the mobile router (MR) and the visiting mobile nodes (VMNs) configure two care-of-addresses: 1) on-link care-of-address (LCoA) and 2) regional care-of-address (RCoA). If the SMR is lower than a predefined threshold, the MR and VMNs perform RCoA and LCoA BU procedures to their home agents (HAs), respectively. Otherwise, LCoA and RCoA BU procedures are conducted by the MR and VMNs, respectively. Via analytical models, we evaluate the performance of the adaptive NEMO support protocol against other NEMO support protocols and derive the optimal SMR threshold. Numerical results demonstrate that the adaptive NEMO support protocol is a valuable solution for promising NEMO applications.