Considerations on performance evaluation of micro-mobility architectures for IP networks

Micro-mobility protocols aim to improve localized mobility by reducing the handover overhead. The mobility plane architecture (MPA) was designed to support micro-mobility in standard IP or MPLS/GMPLS networks in a network-centric way: that is, the burden demanded by micro-mobility is placed on the network, not on the mobile nodes. The aim of this paper is to present some insights on performance evaluation for micro-mobility architectures, using the MPA network implementation as a testbed. Experimental results show it is necessary to consider the type of mobile node when evaluating a micro-mobility scenario. Hardware and software aspects may affect the nodepsilas interaction with the micro-mobility protocols / architectures. The results show the importance of considering (not neglecting) L2 and L3 association times because they can affect all procedures involving new associations (such as registration and handover). Proposed models for evaluating mobile architectures consider as irrelevant the times for L2 attachment to a new base station and acquisition of a new IP address for the mobile node, which results in an overestimate of the performance for the mobile architecture.