Cost analysis of mobility management entities for SIGMA

To facilitate mobile computing, mobility protocols have been proposed and mobility management involves signaling costs. Widespread use of IP-enabled mobile devices have resulted in increase in number of mobile users in the network and the signaling cost on underlying mobility entities have increased significantly, which will result in performance degradation of the mobility protocols. However, there has been no comprehensive cost analysis of mobility protocol entities that considers all possible costs for mobility management. In this paper, we have developed analytical models to estimate total costs of mobility management entities of SIGMA, an IP-diversity based seamless handover protocol. We have presented numerical results to demonstrate the impact of increased of network size, mobility rate, traffic rate and data volume on these costs. Our results show that a significant amount of resources are required by the mobility entities for transmission, processing of various signaling messages, as well as searching location database. Our cost analysis will thus help network engineers estimate actual resource requirements of the network in future design.