PM²PLS: Integrating Proxy Mobile IPv6 and MPLS in Wireless Access Networks

This paper proposes a handover scheme supporting Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) in a Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) domain that improves the mobility and gives Quality of Service (QoS) and Traffic Engineering (TE) capabilities in a mobile MPLS access network. The proposed scheme takes advantage of both PMIPv6 and MPLS. PMIPv6 was designed to provide Network-based Localized Mobility Management (NETLMM) to a Mobile Node (MN), therefore, the MN does not perform any mobility related signaling, while MPLS is used as an alternative tunnel technology between the Mobile Access Gateway (MAG) and the Local Mobility Anchor (LMA) by replacing the IP-in-IP tunnels with Label Switched Path (LSP) tunnels. It can also be integrated with other Quality of Service (QoS) architectures as the Differentiated Services (DiffServ) one or the Integrated Services (IntServ) one. In this study, we used MATLAB to perform an analysis to evaluate the impact of introducing MPLS technology in PMIPv6 domain based on handover latency and this was compared with PMIPv6 and a PMIPv6/MPLS integration. We proved that the proposed scheme can obtain better handover performance than other proposed schemes.