Performance evaluation of the hierarchical Mobile IPv6 approach in a WLAN hotspot scenario

The convergence of wireless networking and IP networking more and more requires solutions for transporting real time application data to IP enabled mobile devices and mobile networks. Even if the ingenious mobile IPv6 protocol performs sufficient in macro environments with non real time traffic, seamless mobility requires some more enhanced protocol procedures in between the mobile node and the involved network entities. Limiting the effect of handovers has the potential to considerably improve handover performance in terms of latency and packet loss. This contribution is going to present an extensive simulation study via ns-2 on the performance of the hierarchical mobile IPv6 approach. The demonstrated simulation scenarios comprise up to nine access routers and up to 70 mobile nodes that communicate in accordance with the popular IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN standard, as one of the possible wireless access networks in a future all-IP network infrastructure. The study provides quantitative results of the performance metrics as observed by one single mobile node that may either move deterministically or randomly while the other MNs follow a random movement pattern all the time, providing realistic "interference" with respect to the observed mobile node.